


Contracted

by AMeetingEngagement



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-01-13
Updated: 2013-07-18
Packaged: 2017-11-25 09:24:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 55,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/637418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AMeetingEngagement/pseuds/AMeetingEngagement
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Villains don’t have friends, and the Dark One is no exception. But when one of his deals doesn't quite work out the way he expects, Rumpelstiltskin sees the opportunity to cultivate an ally. And in time, his choice will provide him with a powerful tool to use in crafting a certain curse…</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Bitter Harvest

**Author's Note:**

> All right, folks, here is my first attempt at OUAT fanfiction. As I mentioned before, it’s not Rumbelle-centric, but does follow canon pretty closely…with a few minor changes. There’s a lot of Rumbelle out there and I wanted to explore the possibility that Belle hadn’t been the only one to live with Rumpelstiltskin in the Dark Castle. I’ll do my best to make sure my central character doesn’t become a Mary Sue! This story starts about twenty years before Skin Deep. 
> 
> For tariella, who was the only one to venture an opinion on seeing this on the page!

Once upon a time, in the foothills that crouched below the West Mountains, there was a small vineyard. There was nothing particularly special about the grapes, or the land, or those who worked it. They had a talent for icewines, but icewine was a risky business, especially for such a small farm. The harvest had to come in after the freeze but before the grapes rotted on the vine, and sometimes the gamble did not pay off. Those were lean years, but somehow they always scraped through.

The master of the farm had six sons by his raven-haired wife; the eldest was fourteen and the youngest just two. The boys were all hale and sturdy like their father, with their mother’s dark hair but none of her delicate skin or wild curls. They were mostly happy, but when their mother found herself expecting another babe, she and her husband began to talk in low voices over the fire at night about how they might care for a seventh child, with six healthy boys already straining their resources.

And, just before the ice harvest, disaster struck.

It was no one’s fault that the axle of the wagon broke that day; the wagon hadn’t been overloaded or driven over rough ground. It was simply old, and there was a flaw that gave way when one wheel caught on a rock. But the master of the vineyard had the misfortune to be too close to the startled horses when the crack of the axle sounded, and he went down in the road with a hoof in the middle of his back. The crack of something snapping echoed the axle’s breaking, and the man’s sons – those who were old enough to be helping him – gasped in horror before pulling the horses away from their father.

He was not dead, but he might as well have been. Something in his back had been broken, and he could no longer move his legs.

The local healer was sent for, but to no avail. She might have been able to set a bone or salve a wound, but such a severe injury was beyond her powers. When she finally left the somber cottage, she stopped the man’s wife at the door and slipped a scrap of parchment into her hands. “There is only one who can help, and you must think hard before you call on him,” she murmured to the black-haired woman.

The woman’s eyes went wide. “You can’t mean…the Spinner?” 

The healer nodded, face grim. “I have heard that he works wonders. But his price is never small, no matter how trivial it may seem at first. There is a reason they also call him Dark One.”

The woman looked down at the tiny bit of parchment, worrying it between her fingers. “How…how would one summon him?”

“Call that name three times. If he chooses, he will come. If not…” The healer shrugged wearily. “All magic is risky, and his most of all. You might be wiser not to try it, but I will leave the choice with you.” 

The black-haired woman stared at the name on the paper for a long time after the healer departed. Finally, she went inside to speak with her husband. He was conscious, though in great discomfort; the healer had administered the strongest palliative draught that she dared and ordered him to lie flat and still, but it was apparent that it could not take away all the pain. His wife gave him the healer’s words and waited as he thought them over, a fine sheen of sweat filming his forehead despite the potion he’d taken.

“It’s nearly time for the harvest,” his wife said quietly. “And the boys can’t manage it without you.” It was true; they could expect some help from their neighbors, if they promised them a portion of the profits, but the harvest had to be done in one day, and none of their neighbors had the knowledge of pressing the frozen grapes.

The man’s face contorted in despair, even as he pressed his wife’s hand between his fingers in an attempt to comfort her. “I know. Then what choice do we have?” 

His wife looked down at her belly, just beginning to swell beneath her dress. “They say he takes children as his price,” she murmured. “Babes. What if he wants this one – or one of the boys?”

Her husband was silent for a moment. “The babe is not yet come. Even if he asks for it, he would have to wait, and perhaps we could…persuade him otherwise, in the meantime.”

“He’s too cunning. He’ll never allow that. No one breaks deals with him, no one!”

The husband took a deep breath. “I know.” He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them to meet his wife’s honey-brown ones. “Could we…could we spare but one? I have never heard it said that he mistreats the children he takes. If he only gave the child a new home somewhere else…”

Tears were streaming down his wife’s cheeks at the thought of giving up her babe, but she could see no other course of action but to lose the harvest, and starve, with six boys and a husband who could no longer work. That was unthinkable; that would doom them all. “We can ask,” she replied, nearly choking on the words. “Perhaps…” She left the thought unfinished.

There was no raucous noise at the dinner table that night, and the silence went on as the boys climbed into the cottage’s loft to their beds, for all but the youngest knew how dire the situation was, and even the two-year-old could tell that something was wrong. Their parents waited until the rustling and shifting above had ceased for some time, and then the woman pulled the scrap of parchment from her pocket. She bowed her head over it for a moment, then said breathlessly, “Rumpelstiltskin, we would beg your aid. Rumpelstiltskin. Rumpelstiltskin.”

The cottage was silent, save for the crumbling of coals in the fire; even the wind outside seemed to have paused in its customary whistling. The husband and wife looked at each other, wide-eyed, waiting. But when there was no response to the woman’s words, they both seemed to sag with disappointment. “I’ll get you a cup of last year’s pressing,” the woman said dully, standing and smoothing her hands over her skirts. “It might help you sleep.”

“Pour me a cup as well, dearie,” a high, grating voice said from the other side of the room. “It’s a cold night out there.”

The woman gasped in shock, and the husband’s eyes widened and he strained to sit up before collapsing back on the bed in a haze of pain. Lounging on one of the benches at the kitchen table was an extraordinary creature – a frightful creature of wild grey hair, scaled leather clothing, glittering skin and huge, piercing eyes. He grinned, showing a mouthful of stained teeth, and threw up a hand in an extravagant gesture. “You called?” 

The woman put herself between the apparition and her husband, straightening her spine and fisting her hands in her apron. “We did, my lord. We wished to ask for your help.”

The strange, off-putting gaze flickered over her small form with interest before passing on to the man. “A grievous injury, that,” Rumpelstiltskin said, fanning his fingers at the farmer’s prone form. “I take it you wish to make a deal for a healing?” 

The woman’s lips compressed in nervousness, but she nodded. “Yes.” She opened a small cabinet and took out three small pottery cups and a glass flask. Pouring a small measure of thick, honey-gold wine into each, she set one before the imp before retreating to the bedside with the remaining two. “Our healer can do nothing,” the woman added, voice shaking. “She said a magical cure was…was our only hope.”

Rumpelstiltskin turned his gaze toward the ceiling and tilted his head, looking far too reptilian for anyone who wore a man’s form. “Quite a gaggle of young ones you’ve got up there,” he said with a hair-raising giggle. “And what would you offer me in exchange for this cure?”

All the blood drained from the woman’s face, and her husband clutched her hand, trying to offer strength. “We have little,” he admitted. “The harvest will yield a good wine this year, if we can get it in time, but we must sell it to survive. And a few bottles would be a poor payment for such as your skills.”

The imp plucked up his cup and sipped at it delicately. “Delicious,” he declared, “but you’re quite right. My cellars want for nothing.” He drained the cup and set it aside, then rose, rubbing his hands together. “But I can see that you might have something else to offer me in a few months, dearie.” He indicated the woman’s gently rounded belly.

The woman closed her eyes and let out a slow breath. “Yes,” she admitted. “Our seventh. But we had hoped…Would the child be cared for?” she asked abruptly, as if afraid to hesitate lest her courage fail her. “Would he have a good home?”

To their surprise, Rumpelstiltskin leaped up and swept a dramatic bow. “There’s always someone who wants a child. Besides – ” He giggled again, not a reassuring sound – “no reason for me to keep a babe about. Messy, troublesome little things they are.” 

The husband gripped his wife’s hand tighter. “We can’t,” he said, a note of panic in his agonized tone. “We can’t do this. We’ll find another way – ” 

The woman looked down at him, shaking her head. “No. No, dearest, he’s right. We have nothing else, and there is no other way. We must.” She gently freed her hand from his grasp and stood once more, facing Rumpelstiltskin. The top of her head barely reached the level of his nose, but she held herself so that she seemed taller, as unyielding as an oak. She took a deep breath. “If you heal my husband’s injuries now, you may have the child I carry.”

The imp’s eyes glittered when he heard the woman’s words. “Are you quite sure, dearie? Think carefully, now. Wouldn’t want you to regret this later on.”

The husband started to say something, but his wife laid her hand on his shoulder and squeezed, silencing him. “No. No, you’ve named the price, and we will pay it.”

Rumpelstiltskin smiled, and though there was no malice in it, it was in no way comforting or friendly. “Grand.” He flicked out a hand and a scroll unfurled from it; an inkwell and quill appeared on the table. “You and your husband have but to sign the contract and the deal is struck.”

The woman left her husband’s side and approached the table. Gingerly, she picked up the paper and scrutinized it, tilting it a bit to catch the light better. After a moment, Rumpelstiltskin frowned and tipped his head, as though confused. “Whatever are you doing?”

A curl escaped from the woman’s cap as she looked at the sorcerer sidelong. “Reading the contract, my lord.” She tucked the curl away as she turned her gaze back to the page.

The imp frowned. “No one reads the contract.”

“Perhaps people would be happier with their deals if they did,” the woman replied absently as her eyes scanned down the fine script. “My child will not suffer because I was negligent.”

Rumpelstiltskin couldn’t seem to find anything to say to that, so he prowled around the cottage, trailing his fingers over the furniture and fiddling with the few small objects on the shelves and counters. His boots were loud on the floorboards, accompanied only by the snapping of the fire, the husband’s labored breathing, and the faint crackle of parchment as the wife read.

Finally, the woman set the contract down on the table and took a deep breath. “This is…fair,” she said. “Husband?”

The man wanted to say no, repeat every warning he’d ever heard about dealing with magical creatures, but he trusted his wife above all else, and she was the one with the head for business. If she deemed the contract a fair one, he had to trust her. “All right,” he choked out. 

The woman pulled the quill and inkwell closer, lifted the feather and shook a drop of ink from its tip. Carefully she inscribed her name at the bottom of the page, and then held the parchment so her husband could scratch his own in shakier letters below. 

Rumpelstiltskin plucked the sheet from the woman’s fingers before she could turn to hand it to him; a shake of his wrist furled it once more, and he tucked it away in the recesses of his coat with another of those disconcerting giggles. “A wise choice,” he said. “And now, a cure.” He reached for the half-full bottle of icewine, swirling it before his face. Threads of purple flame streamed through it; when the liquid stilled, he offered it to the woman. 

Her hands shook as she accepted the bottle. “So this is the price of a child,” she murmured, cradling the bottle to her chest above the swell of her growing babe.

The imp held up a clawed finger. “A sip every hour until it’s gone,” he cautioned. “There’s only so much the magic can do to effect a healing; the body must have time to adjust with it.” 

“How will we find you again?” the man asked hoarsely. “If it doesn’t work…if something…” 

That smirk, again. “Oh, my potions always work, dearie, never fear.” Rumpelstiltskin stepped back, and smoke began to swirl around him as he faded from view. His voice echoed as he added, “And when the time comes for me to return, I’ll know.” One last giggle trailed through the house, and then all was quiet and still again. The only sign of the sorcerer’s passing was the third empty cup on the table, and a dark spot where a drop of ink had spilled from the quill. 

The woman let out a long, shaky breath and loosened her hands on the bottle. “Well,” she said simply, staring at nothing

Her husband tried to reach for her from where he reclined on the bed. “Dearest…” 

She squared her shoulders and pressed her lips together, sitting down on the edge of the bed. “It will be all right,” she said softly, as much to reassure herself as him. “Here. You should have the first dose.” Her grip was steady as she lifted the bottle to her husband’s lips, but her gaze was turned inward, and she didn’t see the tears slowly slipping down his cheeks onto her hands. 

* * *

The countryside was soaked in rain when Rumpelstiltskin returned that spring. The vineyard looked much the same as before, though the yard of the house was not as neat as it had once been. Heedless of the rain, he strode across the muddy ground and knocked hard on the front door. He could have appeared inside, of course, but he never missed a chance to make an entrance, and he’d already tried that trick once. 

It was some time before one of the boys – a lad of ten or so – opened the door for him. The child was hollow-eyed and subdued, and barely twitched at the sight of the sorcerer. “Papa,” the boy said, half-turning toward the hearth. “Papa, he’s here.” 

The child closed the door behind Rumpelstiltskin and then slumped away to another corner of the cottage. The imp noted that there was dirt and dust scattered across the floor and a general air of neglect about the cottage; used dishes were heaped on the table, the bed rumpled and unmade, and the son’s clothing was wrinkled and grimy. Their father sat on a chair before the hearth, staring at the flames, and stirring not an inch when Rumpelstiltskin approached. At his side was a venerable cradle, heaped with blankets but still and unattended.

Rumpelstiltskin rubbed his hands together and placed them beneath his chin in an absurd parody of praying. “Dearie me, why such long faces?” he asked obsequiously.

To his surprise, the answer came from the steps of the stairs leading to the cottage’s upper floor. “Mama’s dead,” said another black-haired boy, a few years younger than his brother. He hugged his knees to his chest and peered at Rumpelstiltskin over them, his pale blue eyes rimmed with red.

The imp stilled, glancing at the near-catatonic man before the hearth before fixing his gaze on the boy once more. “I see. When?”

“Three days ago,” the boy replied. 

“We buried her yesterday,” the older boy added from the kitchen table, where he was haphazardly stacking dishes in a basin.

Rumpelstiltskin’s expression was unreadable, though his posture had altered. His stance was not the jaunty, mocking one it had been, but upright and subdued. “My condolences,” he said, with less of the goblin’s cackle in his voice this time.

“Are you here to take our sister?” the younger boy demanded, raising his head as though in challenge. 

“Sister?” Rumpelstiltskin’s tone was just a little startled; he had been expecting either a dead babe or another boy, the seventh son. Though there was no telling the sex of a child before its birth, save with magic more delicate than he had patience for, and he ought not to have been so surprised. Ignoring the stares of the two boys, he approached the cradle and with the tip of one glittering finger, drew back the cloth swaddling the child there. 

A girl it was. Her skin, mostly free of the ruddiness of birth, looked to be the same delicate pale shade as her mother’s had been, and she had a scattering of raven-black curls. Her face was relaxed in sleep, but at the disturbance of her wrappings she opened her eyes and screwed up her face in protest. He knew she probably couldn’t see him yet but her eyes seemed fixed on him nonetheless, and they were strange for a babe, a clear slatey grey rather than blue.

Her father finally shook himself from his reverie. “Take her,” he said in a flat and emotionless tone. 

Rumpelstiltskin was floored. He had expected weeping, or protestations, or further bargaining – all reactions any parent might have to being forced to give up a child. But this man was so far gone in grief that he apparently no longer cared he was about to lose his daughter. 

The man looked up at the sorcerer, and though his eyes were dry, the anguish in them spoke clearly enough. “I can’t…” he whispered. “I can’t. She’s so like her mother. Please, take her.” 

“Papa…” one of the boys said in protest. 

“No!” The man stood and leaned his forehead against the mantelpiece, refusing to look at his sons. “We struck a deal. I won’t break it. Take her, and leave us.” His last words were choked out around a sob. 

Slowly, taking care not to jostle the babe, Rumpelstiltskin lifted her from her cradle. Her face was still scrunched up, but she had not cried, and made no more than a gurgle when he held her against his chest. Her odd eyes closed and she curled into him, tiny hands clutching at the lapel of his dragon-hide coat. 

The imp hesitated, looking around the cottage and finding the two boys watching him accusingly while their father wept. It was unlike him to feel pity, even for the most wretched of the people he dealt with, but the faintest slip of the emotion rose in him now. The boys looked nothing like his son…but their defiance, their protectiveness, reminded him of Bae so suddenly that he could hardly bear their presence.  

With a flick of his hand, he conjured up a spindle full of the golden thread that he crafted, and then laid it in the cradle. “For your boys,” he said softly.

The walls of the cottage faded around him as he gathered his power and flung it into a traveling spell. He should have felt triumph, or at least satisfaction, at the conclusion of the deal, but he felt nothing – nothing but an odd emptiness. When the familiar hangings and rich furniture of his own Great Hall surrounded him once more, he looked down at the child in his arms.

A girl was not so useful for trades as a boy. People were always wanting boys for heirs, or champions, or some other such ridiculousness, but few ever requested a girl. Had she been a boy, he could have had her placed in any one of half a dozen households, but now…“Well, dearie,” he said, lips curling in a rueful smile, “it looks like we’d best get accustomed to each other. You’ll be here longer than I thought.”


	2. The Golden Girl

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Skipping a few years to get to this point. I’ve actually written a series of one-shots that show Aura growing up with Rumpelstiltskin, but in light of new developments in the second season of OUAT, I may be revising those. So…here goes a story which gives you a new reason for Regina’s comment about ‘getting another girl’!
> 
> The quote is from “The Golden Girl” by Bambix.

_Born on a Sunday, she was the golden girl_   
_Twinkling eyes, shiny curls_   
_Much too valuable, so they kept her in a cage_   
_Their own rage reflected on her_   
_Tell her no secrets, tell her lies_   
_Hide the world and close her eyes_   
_Don;t be sorry, be amused_   
_Keep her world turning_   
_Will she ever know the truth_   
_About her distorted youth_   
_Will she ever realize_   
_That her world is burning_

When she heard the clack of boot heels on stone, Aura hurried into the Great Hall and found Rumpelstiltskin pacing in his shirtsleeves. He’d returned from his latest endeavor energized, but he’d also gotten mud all over his long leather coat. Aura sighed. Taking care of their clothing was one of her jobs, but she swore he went out of his way to abuse his, just to irritate her. Although after eighteen years living with the imp, she had gotten very good at it.

She rolled her eyes in annoyance and went to retrieve the coat from where he’d carelessly thrown it over a chair. It looked as though he’d walked all the way up the road to the castle, rather than magicking himself to the main doors. There was no telling why he’d done something like that, and she’d given up asking what he did to get his clothing so mucky after the time he’d shown up with bloodstains on his lapels. 

It was the work of a moment to collect a bowl, soft brushes and the soap that she used on leather, and a drying cloth, and the work of a second moment to fill the bowl with water from the kettle that hung over the hearth. The water needed to cool first, though, and she perched on the table in the center of the room to wait.

“Was it a successful day?” she asked Rumpelstiltskin when his pacing finally slowed. She was always hungry to hear what was happening outside the estate, and if he was in the right mood he would oblige her. 

Today was a good day, it seemed, because he deigned to answer. “Of course, dearie,” he said, tossing a glance her way.

She began shaving slivers of the soap into the bowl with the small knife she wore at her waist. “Where did you go this time?”

Rumpelstiltskin threw up a hand in an airy gesture. “Midas, again. It will be a miracle if that man goes a whole month without turning some poor peasant into a statue.” 

Aura’s mouth quirked; Midas-of-the-ill-considered-golden-touch was often forced to call on her master to correct his latest blunder, and she loved hearing stories about the careless king. “I wish I could have seen him trying to explain himself this time.”

“Oh, he’s just another petty king, trying to keep his pitiful kingdom in order. A fool. He’d have bored you.”

Aura tested the water in the bowl, and found it cool enough. She laid the cloth across her knees and the coat over it, then swirled a brush in the water and began scrubbing the mud off the coat’s hem. “I wouldn’t know,” she replied in the same offhand tone. “You never let me come with you when you deal.”

“Always the same complaint,” he said, his tone of amusement letting her know that he was not falling for her nonchalance. “You know what the answer is.”

She ground the brush perhaps a touch too hard against the leather. He wasn’t even going to give her a chance to make a case this time. “Yes, of course it’s always the same. It’s not safe to bring me along when you’re dealing, better to stay in the castle and bore myself silly. No need to let your enemies know about me. Why change what works?” Water splattered on her skirt as she dunked the brush into the bowl with unnecessary force. “Nothing ever changes here. Has it always been this way? Have you always been this way? Or were you different once?”

He circled the table so he could lean close to her. “Careful, Aura,” he said. “You know there are questions I won’t answer.” There was a hint of threat in his tone, and Aura dropped her gaze with a scowl, seeing that he wasn’t interested in playing this game. She’d lose, if she tried. Her master had brought down kings and philosophers, won power from sorceresses and dragons, and she of all people knew that he was not to be trifled with. 

He was fond of her in his way, Aura supposed, but theirs was a strange relationship. He was nothing like a father to her, but they were more familiar than master and maid. He’d raised her himself, never mentioning whether she had family elsewhere, no matter how often she asked…but she was not unhappy with him. He treated her well, and to sate her intense curiosity, had educated her in any number of odd and useful skills over the years. 

Including the business of building contracts. Now that she was old enough to understand their nuances, she was responsible for scribing many of the documents that bound the subjects of his deals. Thousands of hours of that work had slowly made Aura indifferent to the situations of his victims. Most seemed so foolish that they could not see the simplest solution to their own plights. They were greedy, eager for the easy path, heedless of anything beyond their own gratification or an end to their troubles. Rumpelstiltskin preyed on the desperate souls who should have known better than to deal with a dark creature like him. Even his ward, who could certainly be considered a biased judge, knew how dangerous a man he could be. If his victims were so blind that they couldn’t see that, she had little sympathy for them.

Scribing those contracts had awoken her curiosity long ago, however. She spent hours imagining what life was like beyond Rumpelstiltskin’s lands – what could drive men and women to such risky, tricky deals? What could make them welcome magic into their lives? She devoured the books in Rumpelstiltskin’s library, hoping for insight into the outside world, but even the most fantastic of stories she found there could never satisfy her hunger to experience it for herself. 

But he wouldn’t let her leave his estate. Oh, she had the run of the Dark Castle, and the grounds were extensive, encompassing much of the surrounding mountains. She spent as much time wandering the peaks as she did attending to her chores, and knew the rocky crags as intimately as she did the halls of her home. But his power kept her from straying beyond the boundaries of the estate, and he never took her with him when he went dealing. There was a town less than a day away, and she had never seen it. She met some of the people that ventured all the way to the castle, but only when he would let her – and that wasn’t often.

It was an old point of contention. As she’d grown older, Aura had become less and less content to be confined, and started asking to see more of the world. Like all young adults, she chafed at restriction; she wanted to live her life on her own terms, not his. But no matter how often she pleaded, he wouldn’t countenance it, and her arguing was as likely to provoke an angry reaction as an amused one. Sometimes she wondered at her own folly in risking his ire – like now.

Rumpelstiltskin smiled a little, having evidently decided not to take offense at her prying, and then took up a seat at his spinning-wheel, joining a shank of wool to the leader thread and laying a few blades of straw against it. “Why the sudden attack of insight, dearie?” he asked as his fingers pinched the wool and straw together. He turned the wheel slowly with his free hand, and from the twining of fiber and straw spun out a fine gold thread. 

Aura gave the gold a brief glance before returning to her own work, unimpressed – she’d seen the trick a thousand times before. “Curiosity,” she replied, wiping muddy water from the coat with a corner of the drying cloth. “The same as always.”

“Curiosity killed the cat,” he said in a particularly irritating singsong, not looking at her.

“And satisfaction brought it back,” she retorted, finishing the saying. It was a favorite bit of banter between them. “You’d have no deals if not for curiosity.” 

“True enough,” he murmured. 

“Then why is my curiosity such a bad thing?” she demanded, hands stilling. “Why won’t you let me leave this place?”

Rumpelstiltskin, too, stopped his work. “And why would you want to leave? It is a cruel world, Aura, with no sympathy or charity for a woman alone.” His grey eyes rested on her unsettlingly, and he was unsmiling. “You have a home here, you are fed and clothed and kept in comfort.”

She stared back, refusing to be cowed by his looks. She’d grown up with them, after all. “Would you miss me?” Aura let a bit of mockery creep into her voice, since the two of them had rehashed this jaded exchange more times than she could count. She didn’t expect his reply to be any different.

He struck a pose, throwing up a hand in an overly grand gesture. “To miss something, one must feel affection for it,” he said, as if declaiming from a play.

“That’s not an answer,” she retorted. Conversations with Rumpelstiltskin were often like this; it was nearly impossible to draw a straight answer from the man. 

He giggled, a hair-raising sound that she hated. It was calculated for effect – it might sound mad, but he was just as sane as she was – and the sound of it played uncomfortably up her spine. “No, it isn’t. Tell me, what would you do out there in the cruel world? Spin? Sing? Write letters and writs for petty magistrates in some backwater town? Or maybe you think to marry yourself off to some brainless fop with a full purse. You’d find it excruciatingly boring, you know.”

She sniffed. “Of course I would. Besides, who would want to marry me, knowing who raised me?” She rinsed her brush in the bowl and started working on the coat’s sleeves. “I wasn’t talking about marriage. I don’t care about that. But I’m eighteen and there’s an entire world out there I haven’t seen! I write contracts for people I’ve never laid eyes on, in places I’ve never been. I’ve been through every book in your library and I haven’t seen any of the places they describe. I haven’t even been to the town, for pity’s sake! It’s maddening!”

Her master left his seat at the spinning wheel and came to lean against the table next to her. “Perhaps I’ve indulged you too much, Aura. You’re getting…ideas.” He said the last with another airy gesture.

“Is that a bad thing?” she retorted, scrubbing at a particularly stubborn patch of grime. “If you didn’t want me to have mind of my own, you shouldn’t have taught me to use it.”

He tipped his finger in a fencer’s salute. “A hit.”

He still wasn’t taking her seriously. Aura sighed and set the coat down on her knees. “I’m not a fool. I know that there are dangers beyond your lands. I know you have enemies. You’ve protected me from them so far, but what if someday you can’t do that anymore? What will I do, knowing nothing of the world past these borders?”

“Little possibility of that, dearie. There’s no one more powerful than me in all the kingdoms.” He smirked, the self-satisfied look of a man who had everything. 

“Queen Regina wants to change that,” Aura said darkly. That news reached even to the Dark Castle; Rumpelstiltskin didn’t have many visitors, but when he did, Aura made sure she got all the news – either firsthand, by eavesdropping on her master’s meetings, or directly from the sorcerer later on. Of late, many of his supplicants had been dealing for protection, and they’d related unsettling things about the so-called ‘Evil Queen’ and her ambitions.

Rumpelstiltskin’s smile grew devilish. “Oh, I know she does. And it’s only a matter of time before she finds her power wanting and comes to make a deal with me to supplement it.”

Aura shivered. She had long ago realized that Rumpelstiltskin was he was not a good, kind person, like her books so often described. His cruelties were calculated, though you could see him coming, if you heeded the signs. But there was no predicting what havoc the Queen would wreak, if the rumors about her were to be believed. The woman took pleasure in twisting even seemingly innocent acts into causing pain and despair. Aura had little patience or sympathy for fools, but she didn’t hate anyone enough for it to poison everything she did.

“I don’t see how that will benefit you,” she said. “The Queen is as treacherous as she is cruel. She’ll try to cheat her way out of any deal.” She slipped off the table and set the brush and bowl of muddy water aside so she could wipe the coat dry. “I hope she doesn’t come here. I certainly don’t want to meet her.”

“Nor do I want you to,” Rumpelstiltskin said, still leaning against the table. “I don’t like her meddling with my things.” He’d already covered all the mirrors in the castle, save for the special ones he used for scrying – and even those were kept locked away. 

Aura looked up, scowling again in irritation. “I’m not a thing,” she insisted. 

“No, little goldfinch, you’re not.” He reached out and brushed her cheek with his fingers. “But you’re young, and you’ve much yet to learn.”

“How do you expect me to learn anything if you keep me locked up in here?” she cried, snatching herself away from his hand. It was clear this conversation was going nowhere, so she slung the coat over her arm and grabbed up the cleaning supplies. “I’ll finish this in the laundry.” She whisked herself out of the Great Room and down the corridors that led to the castle’s lower reaches.

The argument was always the same. She demanded to leave the estate, he claimed her confinement was for her own good – or something to that effect – and she stamped off in a huff. She would inevitably spend the next few days avoiding him, or wandering in the mountains, until he grew tired of doing his own laundry and making his own tea and came looking for her. If her books were anything to go by, it was not the usual pattern of things between a master and maid – although she doubted anything about her life with Rumpelstiltskin could be called usual. 

The laundry was warm and steamy, as one might expect; she usually had a cauldron of water boiling on the hearth just to keep up with the steady stream of garments she had to wash. For the most part hers were serviceable things, but Rumpelstiltskin liked to wear leather and silk and brocade, and none of it was easy to clean or keep mended. 

Laundry and cleaning the Castle occupied her mornings and cooking her afternoons. Rumpelstiltskin didn’t always eat supper but they always took tea together; it marked an unofficial break in whatever hostilities had broken out during the day. And living with Rumpelstiltskin presented one with plenty of opportunities for conflict.  There were days when the maid and the sorcerer got on quite well, going about their tasks and acknowledging each other as easily as if they were dancing, even jesting. Aura’s sense of humor had grown to match her master’s dry and dark wit, and his antics were amusing at times.

And then there were days when Aura wanted to stuff her dusting rag down Rumpelstiltskin’s giggling throat and beat him senseless with her broom. Today, she decided, was somewhere in between, as he hadn’t driven her to violence yet. Not that she would be successful even if she did act on the impulse. It was hard to get the better of a sorcerer, especially without magic.

A day to take tea in silence, then, and retreat to her room or the library for the evening. Her evenings were her own, and the library was her favorite place in the castle. Ever since Rumpelstiltskin had taught her to read she’d found every excuse to spend hours there, laying on the plush rug in front of the fireplace or curled up in one of the enormous armchairs. She never ran out of books, since the place was enchanted to produce whatever she wanted to read. 

The library, the laundry, the kitchen, and one of the small tower bedrooms were her domain; the rest of the Castle, including the workroom in the tallest tower and the storerooms below, were her master’s. The Great Hall, they shared. It was first and foremost a place for Rumpelstiltskin to impress his guests and display his collection of magical oddities, but Aura had made inroads over the years, and there was a chair and a basket of threadwork by the fire for her as well. 

Still, he often took pains to keep people from seeing much of her, and that was the great puzzle of her life. Why did he keep her locked up? Why go to such lengths to protect her? She was not his apprentice, so she could not let slip his conjuring secrets. She had no prospects for marriage, so he was not defending her honor for the purpose of building alliances or currying favor with an ally. He did not need her to clean the castle, or cook his food, or prepare his tea, when he could just as easily do it with magic – despite his insistence that all magic had a cost, he seemed to think nothing of using small enchantments each day. 

And he did not love her. 

Rumpelstiltskin had many secrets. She’d unraveled a few of them, curious girl that she was, but she still knew little about his past. She could guess, of course. The children’s clothing and toys in the attic, for example, hinted at a family long gone, though she found it hard to believe that Rumpelstiltskin was ever a family man. But the most aggravating secret of all was how she fit into his life. There were times when she could hardly fathom why he’d brought her here at all. He’d hinted that it was because of a deal, but she could never see what benefit he got from her presence, aside from mere amusement. 

Had she been on equal footing with Rumpelstiltskin, she might have had the power to uncover the answers she craved, but one thing he would not teach her was magic – because, he claimed, he could not. She could spin wool into fine thread, but not gold; she could write a contract as airtight as any he produced, but could not bind the dealmaker to his price; she could recite half the books in his library from memory, but knew none of the words to speak to ensnare someone in a spell. Even the simplest spells refused to work for her, and Rumpelstiltskin wouldn’t even tell her why. After a while, she’d stopped trying them.

It was almost embarrassing, really. Rumpelstiltskin was the most powerful sorcerer in the twelve kingdoms, and Aura was unable to claim even the slightest skill at wielding power, despite having grown up in his care. There were only two things about her that could even be called eldritch: she had immunity to small magics, and she could scent a spell like perfume. 

The second was probably a consequence of growing up in the Dark Castle, she had always thought. She’d certainly stuck her nose in enough places around the estate to recognize magic being worked. The first ability, however, flummoxed her. Rumpelstiltskin certainly hadn’t given it to her, so it must be something inherited from her true parents – but he gave no indication of knowing how they had passed it on, and no inclination to discuss the matter. 

“The pattern of my life,” Aura muttered as she hung the coat on a rack in the laundry and finished polishing off the last bits of mud. “Questions but never answers.”

She looked down at her reflection in the bowl of murky water. She often tried to imagine what her birth family had been like, picking a feature and guessing whether it had come from her mother or father, or was entirely her own. Who had given her the ears that stuck out? Whose was the snub nose? Had her mother had a dark curly mane, or had her father had a mop of tight black curls? Was her father short, or had her mother been small and bird-like? Who had had the golden eyes, that nearly matched the glowing piles of thread her master spun?

She had long ago known that Rumpelstiltskin was not related to her by blood. She had wondered as a small child whether his glittering skin and mossy eyes were normal, and she was the aberration, but she had eventually seen enough of his visitors to decide that he was the odd one. And, of course, there was his cool demeanor toward her in general. He had never been an affectionate person, but she’d read enough books to understand that blood relations showed each other love, in some form – and Rumpelstiltskin never did. 

Aura didn’t hate him for it, but she did wonder sometimes, wistfully, what it might be like to live the way the people in her books did. To have a family and a mundane life. One where salamanders never nested in the kitchen fire; and the plants in the garden would never poison or transform or attack you and visitors never took tea while balancing a scythe across their knees, or covered the upholstery with glitter, or tried to kidnap the caretaker.

There was a crash from the general direction of the kitchen. Aura sighed and tossed the dirty water out of the door to the courtyard adjoining both rooms, and gathered up one of her ubiquitous brooms. It had taken a week to get rid of the last salamander, and she hoped another hadn’t taken up residence. An ordinary kitchen-broom was a useful tool, but the creatures were rather hard on the bristles, and she didn’t fancy having to replace them for a second time this month.


	3. Monstrous

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Evil Queen pays the Dark Castle a visit and meets Rumpelstiltskin’s latest ‘girl’…who isn’t at all happy about it.

Fall was drawing in and the weather was too foul to wander the mountains while Rumpelstiltskin was away from the Castle on his dealing, so Aura kept herself occupied with mundane tasks. The gardens were fallow, she tended to the goats and sheep first thing in the morning, and she’d caught up with the mending in an irritation-borne fit of domesticity after her latest argument with her master. The floors always needed cleaning and there were enough curtains to keep a laundress busy for a lifetime, but one day she decided it was time to deal with the collection on display in the great hall.

She preferred to do that when Rumpelstiltskin wasn’t around to look over her shoulder. She had learned how to handle the magical objects safely, but her hands were a lot steadier when her master wasn’t critiquing her work. Just in case, she always wore dragon-hide gloves, and made sure that she hadn’t been working with anything else magical that day. Spells had a habit of combining in unexpected ways, and she didn’t fancy having to ask Rumpelstiltskin to disenchant her when he returned.

She’d pulled the curtains in the great hall aside to let in the watery winter sunlight. Rumpelstiltskin didn’t like the sun very much, so he’d nailed them down, but they could still be draped over hooks to reveal a bit of the outside world. Aura had no problem with light, and she always took advantage of his absences to indulge in it. Some days she spent hours just basking in the sun, moving from patch to patch with a book or a bit of mending.

She swung the kettle over the fire blazing in the hearth, meaning to break for tea later, and took up her dusting cloth. The trident in the corner came first. She couldn’t use water on it – strange things happened – but a dry cloth took care of the dust. The hammer was too heavy for her or anyone else to move, so she dusted it in place. Next was the great ugly golden goblet on its pedestal – no water for that either, since it would kill whoever touched the liquid afterward – and then the crossbow, which she could touch as long as she didn’t try to fire it.

When that was done, Aura took a deep breath and blew the dust from the little Arabian lamp rather than rub it off. She’d never make that mistake again, after spending a whole day stuck in the cramped little thing. Rumpelstiltskin had freed her from it, but not before threatening to keep her bound to it with the third of the ‘wishes’ she had been forced to grant him. Having no desire to give her master any more control over her, she had avoided all contact with the innocuous object since she was eleven.

She made sure her gloves were firmly in place before handling the scythe. It was an odd weapon, with a curved axe-head at one end and a stake at the other, and she’d never been able to figure out where Rumpelstiltskin had acquired it. He had warned her not to touch it bare-handed, however, and she handled it gingerly whenever she did have to move it. She cleaned quickly, not liking the faint glow that rimmed the blade when she picked it up, or the soft murmurs that played in her ears.

When she finished with the scythe, she dropped her dusting cloth to the table and went to fill the teapot from the service that waited there. The kettle on the hearth was whistling insistently, signaling that her hot water was ready. She’d already filled the pot with malty tea leaves, and while it steamed gently she took off her gloves and warmed her hands against the pot’s sides. The castle was always chilly, even with the fire and the sunlight.

“That smells lovely, my dear. Did you make enough for two?”

Aura was hard to startle, used as she was to Rumpelstiltskin’s habit of appearing and disappearing through magic, but the sound of a new voice was enough to make her jump. Because she was still holding the teapot, the top flew off and a wave of hot tea washed over her hands. She hissed in pain, clutching her scalded appendages to her stomach as she looked up at the woman who’d appeared in the doorway.

She was a beauty, there was no denying that, but her looks were harsh, all stark contrasts and extremes. Her split skirts and breeches were all black lace and leather, the bodice of her gown cut to emphasize her curves, and splashes of red in the gown and in her hair looked like bloodstains against the black fabrics. The red was mirrored in the rubies around her throat and on her full lips, which were smiling sympathetically. “Oh, my, did I startle you?” she asked in a solicitous tone.

Aura straightened and let her hands drop – they had not been seriously burned – and faced the woman with a carefully neutral expression. Rumpelstiltskin had many customers, often practitioners of magic themselves, and she had learned over the years how to recognize the powerful ones who might give her trouble. This woman stank of magic, and her brand had a sickly sweet smell like overripe apples, enough to turn Aura’s stomach. With that scent, and dressed in colors like a poisonous spider, her visitor definitely fell into the category of ‘potentially dangerous’.

Aura thought frantically as she smoothed her apron. She was surrounded by arcane and powerful objects, but there was no magic that she could use, and if she needed a weapon…But first she needed to figure out who the woman was, lest she offend one of Rumpelstiltskin’s allies by mistake. “You did,” she said, allowing no hint of her panic into her voice. “We don’t get many visitors here.”

The woman sauntered around the table, smiling. “No, I imagine you don’t. It must be dreadful for you, a young woman shut up in this drafty old pile with no one but that nasty imp to talk to. Why, I’d be surprised if you even know who I am!”

Aura knew this game. It was one that Rumpelstiltskin played all the time, trying to get his prey to reveal useful knowledge. While she wasn’t a master like he was, she wasn’t without experience, and she wasn’t going to play this time. “My situation suits me,” she said calmly, refusing to take the bait that the woman offered with her honeyed tones. “Would you care to introduce yourself, madam?”

Her visitor widened her eyes and cocked her head. “Well, aren’t you refreshing! Rumpelstiltskin’s always mucking about with such empty-headed, helpless ninnies, even if they are beautiful. It seems this time he’s finally found one who relies on her wits instead of her looks.”

The barb about her looks was meant to sting, but Aura knew she was no beauty, and she ignored it. She was more interested in the implication that this woman had known Rumpelstiltskin for some time – or at least pretended to be familiar with him. Aura couldn’t remember ever having seen her, but that didn’t mean that she hadn’t ever been here. She spent enough time wandering the estate that Rumpelstiltskin could have had any number of visitors she didn’t know about.

Aura smiled, determined to hold her ground. “I’m just a housekeeper, madam, not a great lady like yourself.” One of the most important rules she’d learned here was to always lie with the truth. Housekeeper she was, even if her duties – and position – were much more complicated than just that.

The woman laughed, and the sound descended into the kind of fruity chortle that Aura imagined would be more appealing to men. It certainly didn’t set her at ease. “Oh, you needn’t stand on ceremony with me, my dear. I’m no self-absorbed man to insist that everyone use titles with me. You may call me Regina – if I may have your name in return, of course.”

Regina! There could only be one magic-user of that name and calibre in the kingdoms, and Aura’s heart thumped painfully at the realization that the Evil Queen was standing not two yards away. She fought to keep her face still, but began edging closer to one of the displays. “I hardly think it would be an appropriate way for a housekeeper to address a queen, Your Majesty.”

Regina’s eyebrows went up. “I hardly think he’d go through so much trouble to keep me from finding out about the existence of a lowly housekeeper. You must be more important to him than that.” She trailed her gloved fingers across the table, as though checking for dust; at the same time she closed a bit more distance between them.

Aura swore silently. She didn’t think that Rumpelstiltskin kept her existence a secret because she was valuable, but she did know some of his secrets, and the details of no small number of his deals. If the Queen decided she would be useful as leverage, she was in deep trouble. The woman had a reputation for enslaving people with magic, and though Aura could resist small spells, power like the Queen held would find her no challenge.

She decided to try and brazen it out. “You will forgive me, Your Majesty, but I don’t like to be trifled with. If you have no business with Rumpelstiltskin, I suggest that you leave before he finds you meddling with his caretaker.” The display stand she wanted was right behind her; two steps and she would be able to grab its contents, if necessary. She hoped it wouldn’t be, because she couldn’t put her gloves on without alerting her opponent.

Regina’s expression sharpened, and the smile she now wore was a predatory one. “If you really think those empty threats are going to get rid of me, you’re not as smart as I thought. Such a pity; I had hoped for a decent conversation.”

Aura’s sensitive nose twitched; the fermenting apple smell had acquired a sharp, scorched note, and she could see wisps of power flickering around the Queen’s hands. “Don’t come any closer,” Aura warned, bracing herself to lunge for a weapon.

She had time for one breath before the woman pitched the spell at her. It hit in a burst of purple smoke – magic was always purple – and wrapped itself around her. Aura could feel it trying to bind her in place, but the Queen had reckoned without her ability to resist spells, and hadn’t made it strong enough. She tore through the magical bonds, scooped the teapot from the table and flung it at Regina’s face, then reached behind her and seized the scythe.

A scream tore from her throat as power seared her hands and dozens of voices started shouting in her head. They were all female, she noted in a detached part of her mind, but it didn’t matter as much as the pain it caused or the Queen, who was spitting like a wet cat. Her hands filled with magic, and the now the apples had such a bitter edge that Aura could tell it was something really nasty, even through the scythe’s assault.

Mustering all her strength, Aura swung the scythe like an axe, aiming for Regina’s neck…and then the Queen vanished in a blinding burst of sparks, reappearing on the far side of the table. “Well, well,” Regina said silkily, wiping tea off her face. Her eyes were glowing with triumph, and Aura flinched. “No wonder he’s kept you a secret. Where did you pick up that little trick, and you with no power of your own?”

Aura’s hands hurt so badly she could barely see straight, but she summoned up her voice anyway. “Leave me alone or I’ll have your head!”

A corner of the woman’s mouth turned up. “That’s my line, little housekeeper. Although I much prefer hearts. Yours will make a  _fascinating_  addition to my collection.”

“No thanks,” Aura spat, even as grey clouds crept in around the edges of her vision and her knees began to grow watery. She wouldn’t let the Queen near her again, she  _wouldn’t_ …

Rumpelstiltskin chose that moment to return, throwing open the doors of the Great Hall and striding in as nonchalantly as if he were arriving for tea. With a glance he took in the faceoff between the two, and then sighed theatrically. “Well, this is quite a ruckus!” he declared, as if he had come upon children having a fight over a toy.

Aura could smell him gathering his own power, in spite of his airy tone. The scents of ashes and gold snaked through the pain of holding the scythe, and she clung to them like lifelines. “A misunderstanding,” she growled, relieved that he had intervened but angry that she needed him to in the first place.

“Always arguing,” he replied, shaking his head sadly. “I’ll have to ask you to leave, Your Majesty, while I discipline the girl. We so rarely have visitors that I’m afraid I’ve neglected to teach her how to…properly receive guests.”

The Queen glared venomously, but she could tell as well as Aura could that his casual air masked an undercurrent of power strong enough to kill. “You really ought to get rid of this one, Rumpel. She’ll turn on you someday,” she said, straightening up and brushing her hands together, as if they were dusty.

Rumpelstiltskin’s eyes glittered when he smiled. “I doubt that, dearie.”

The Queen’s eyes narrowed. “Think on my offer,” she said. “My patience is not infinite, and one way or another I will have that curse. Keep stalling and I’ll do more than frighten your latest plaything.” She spun dramatically, vanishing with another puff of smoke and the scent of burned feathers.

The moment she could no longer sense the Queen’s power, Aura stumbled forward against the table. She let he scythe clatter down on it, but she couldn’t release her grip; her hands seemed to have melted to the wooden handle. The impact drew an awful noise from her lips.

Rumpelstiltskin was at her side in a heartbeat. “Careful now,” he said, rubbing his hands together as he gathered power in them. He laid them over hers where they gripped the handle of the scythe, and her fingers spasmed, releasing the weapon. She gasped, and he picked it up, shaking his head. “I did warn you about this.”

Aura was too busy trying to uncurl her fingers to complain about his condescension. Her hands felt – and looked – like she had thrust them into the fire, and it was all she could do to keep from making another sound. A few tears trickled from her eyes, and she had to let them, not wanting to touch anything. “I didn’t have a choice,” she grated out.

“Everyone has a choice,” he replied, studying the scythe. “You made an impulsive one.”

She tried to spread her fingers and swore as her efforts only ripped skin that seemed to have melted together. It was too much to bear, and she sat down heavily on the floor, hunched over her poor hands. “Her first spell didn’t work,” Aura whispered, rocking as she tried to push the pain away. “She saw it. She steals hearts. If she’d taken mine…”

“Well, that would have been a pretty problem.” Rumpelstiltskin smiled at the scythe, and then set it carefully back on its stand. He sank to one knee beside her and took hold of her wrists, pulling her hands toward him. “That weapon wasn’t meant for you, dearie. You haven’t the lineage to control it.”

Aura squeezed her eyes shut; even the puff of his breath on what was left of her skin was agonizing. “I won’t touch it again. Please…” she pleaded.

“Quiet,” he commanded. She opened her eyes just in time to see the Great Room vanish and the walls of his tower workshop reform around them. Rumpelstiltskin lifted her up and deposited her in a chair, then began pulling bottles and jars off of shelves, setting them on the worktable. “This will take a little doing,” he said. “The scythe has its own kind of power, and it doesn’t take kindly to being used in ways it wasn’t meant for.”

“Obviously,” Aura retorted, somewhat less than forcefully. The burning in her hands was sharp and acidic, but whinging wouldn’t help make it better, so she asked a question to distract herself. “What was she after? She said something about a curse.”

“Ah,” Rumpelstiltskin said as he uncapped bottles and jars and measured liquids into a bowl. “She’s not very subtle, is she?”

“About as subtle as a troll. She’s got her own magic. What does she need your help for?”

“Oh, it’s little more than petty revenge, no matter what the scale. She wants a curse far beyond her abilities – strong enough to change our entire world.” He smiled down at the bowl as he mixed.

Aura’s eyes widened in horror. “Are you mad?” she demanded. “Gods, that could kill us all! And you’d be caught in it too!”

He paused, looking up at her. “You think I haven’t considered that?”

Maybe he had, but that didn’t make it any better. “She’d betray you as soon as she got hold of such a thing. And – all those innocent people in the kingdoms, they’d be helpless.” She looked down at her lap, at her ruined hands. “Like me. How could you do that to them?”

He finished combining the ingredients he’d gathered, then reached for a coil of gold thread and lowered it into the mixture. “What’s one more atrocity to my name, after all?” he said. “Surely you’re familiar with my reputation by now.” Golden light danced over his face as the thread dissolved and the liquid in the bowl roiled.

“Of course I am!” she exclaimed. “But you’re not a monster. Only a monster would – would condemn so many people to such a fate. Or give the Queen that kind of power, knowing what she’d do with it. That would be monstrous.”

When he looked up at her again, Rumpelstiltskin’s face seemed like a fearsome mask, smiling and reptilian, with wide eyes that were, for a moment, utterly mad. “Perhaps you don’t know me as well as you think, dearie. Are you so sure I wouldn’t go through with it?”

Aura’s breath hitched. She’d lived with this man her whole life, and she knew he could be cruel, but not so cruel that he would doom the people of an entire  _world_. She fervently wished that he was just saying it to scare her…but now, she wasn’t quite sure. One thing she did know: he never did anything without a good reason. He didn’t act as though he had any obligation to help the Queen, so he must have some plan of his own, with Regina no more than a pawn in it. But what plan could require so drastic a vehicle as that kind of curse?

She was silent. Just now, she hadn’t the courage to answer him. After a moment his face became mobile again, and the smile was a normal one, amused at her fear.

He rounded the worktable with the bowl, now settled to a faint golden aura, and stood over her. “Give me your hands.” When she held them out, grimacing at the pain as her skin pulled, he set the bowl on her lap, seized her wrists and plunged her hands into the liquid. Aura gasped as an icy chill washed over them, looking down in shock as the liquid steamed and her burned skin peeled back and dissolved. It was not a pleasant process. The chill dulled her nerves considerably, but she could still feel what was happening. She bit her lip and kept silent; carrying on would just irritate her master, and she was already on shaky ground.

Finally the liquid in the bowl boiled away, and her hands were whole once more – pink and tender and probably going to be useless for the rest of the day, but repaired nonetheless. Aura let out a long breath and relaxed in the chair. “Thank you,” she said. She didn’t often say that – he sometimes took it as an admission of a debt – but today he seemed to have decided to be generous.

“See that you’re less foolhardy in the future,” Rumpelstiltskin said, proving that just because he was being generous didn’t mean he was also going to be pleasant. “We’ve a great deal of work to do if I’m to twist so complicated a curse.”

Aura let out a breath. “You’re really going to do it. And you want  _me_  to help? I can’t even defend myself against magic, much less twist a spell. You know that,” she added bitterly. It had been difficult, growing up with a man who used magic as easily as breathing, and being unable to work it herself.

Rumpelstiltskin shook his head. “With a curse of this magnitude, there’s more involved than mere magic,” he said mysteriously.

“Even so, why would I want to make the Queen more powerful? How long do you think she’ll wait to come back and rip my heart out?”

Rumpelstiltskin sighed and fluttered his hands, as if she were merely being silly. “Don’t be so shortsighted, Aura,” he chided. “You’re only thinking of your own safety. Twisting this curse will lure the Queen into believing that she has the upper hand. I have my own reasons for crafting it, far more important than her petty games of revenge.”

Aura’s eyes widened. He’d admitted it! “And those are?” she ventured.

He wagged a finger at her. “Not for you to know. Suffice to say that one of the benefits will be Regina’s downfall. That ought to satisfy you.”

Crossing the workroom, he pulled a book from a shelf – one of the volumes she hated to handle, bound in something that looked like leather but was always eerily warm to the touch. A small wind ruffled the pages as he set it down on his bench and opened the cover. “This isn’t just a working that will turn to my advantage, dearie. If you’re bold enough to risk it, this could gain you something you’ve wanted well.” He looked up, slipping her a sly gaze. “Care to make a deal?”

Aura’s first reaction was shock, and her second was amusement; she expressed the latter by laughing. “You must really think me a fool. I’ve spent my entire life under your guidance, and you expect me to fall into that trap?”

“Think carefully before you refuse,” he cautioned, turning a page of his book. “I know you have dreams, Aura. You want to see the world beyond the bounds I’ve set. You want the freedom to make your own choices.”

He knew exactly which weakness to play on. Of course she wanted her freedom! She’d been chafing against his restrictions for years. But Aura knew her master’s tricks and turns as well as she knew the corridors of the castle, and she knew better than to trust him now. He’d never cared about her dreams before. “I’ll never get that freedom from you,” she said.

“I’m the only one who can grant it,” he replied, smiling.

“What do you gain from this?”

Rumpelstiltskin put a hand to his heart and made a shocked face. “I’m horrified to think that you don’t trust me.”

She gave a short bark of laughter. “Of course I don’t.”

“Do you fear the Queen?”

“Not as much as you.”

“Clever girl.” He set his book down and leaned over the table. “Don’t be so clever that you cheat yourself of a precious opportunity, dearie. I can grant you freedom and safety, and you have…qualities that I must make use of for the curse.”

Gods, there must really be something he wanted of her, but why didn’t he just take it? She wasn’t in a position to dictate her own fate – never had been, and never would be, as long as she belonged to him. Aura rubbed her hands nervously, forgetting that they were still tender. She winced, then laid them flat on the table and looked her master in the eye. She wouldn’t find out anything useful by being timid. “What are you proposing?”

“Here is the deal.” His eyes glittered dangerously, and she had to fight not to flinch; it was his hunting face. “I will grant you ten years to pursue your dreams. Ten years, living in safety and comfort, in a place where the Queen cannot touch you and I will not seek you out. Ten years to do whatever you wish. But at the end of that time, you must return and give me whatever aid I ask. If your service helps defeat the Queen, then you will have your freedom for the rest of your life.”

There were far too many ambiguities in that deal for her comfort. “Where is this place? What kind of aid? And how long will my life last after this hypothetical ‘defeat’?”

To her surprise, he actually deigned to answer her questions. “The curse will bring us – all of us – to a land without magic. You’ll be safe from Regina there, for a time. The aid?” He spread his hands. “In such a place, who knows what that would entail? I will make use of your abilities as I see fit. And as for your life…” He smiled again, and it wasn’t a pleasant one. “That will last as long as you have the cunning to preserve it. Even I can’t foresee how long someone will live.”

She knew better. Oh, Aura knew better than to let herself be tempted. There was no way this could end well for her. But she desperately wanted what he was offering. The Queen frightened her badly, and there was no way even Rumpelstiltskin could protect her forever. She wanted to be free to see the world, and he’d always refused let her do that…until now. “What ‘qualities’ are you talking about?” she asked.

“Oh, you could guess that, dearie.” He flicked a finger at her, and she caught the scent of a minor cosmetic spell before it wafted into her face. Her hair flickered gold, then returned to its customary black. “Your immunity is unique. If I craft this curse, I’ll want to ensure that I am proof against its more…deleterious effects. Your contribution will make that possible.”

Aura didn’t like the sound of that at all. “And what exactly would my contribution be?”

Rumplestiltskin’s smile was truly frightening. “Blood makes some of the most powerful spells of all.”

Her stomach dropped straight through the floor. Blood magic was nasty, dangerous stuff. She could always tell when he’d been dabbling in it, and she did her best to keep away from him until the taint had vanished. Sometimes it took days, which she usually spent on the opposite side of the castle, or if possible in the mountains. The idea of willingly taking part in it terrified her.

This deal was getting worse and worse. Even if she scribed the terms herself, even if she could bring herself to participate in blood magic…No, there was something wrong here, very wrong. “You could just take what you needed. I couldn’t stop you.”

For a moment, she thought she might actually have startled him. Rumpelstiltskin, taken off guard? Unheard of. But it was there in his face when he turned around to stare at her, just the barest hint of surprise. “But it is so much more potent when it’s freely given,” he replied, recovering quickly. “You need not fear, little goldfinch. You won’t die of it. That would be breaking the deal.” He spread his hands. “I’ll even let you scribe the contract, if that will settle your mind.”

She was so alarmed that she couldn’t summon up the ire to bristle at the nickname, even though she’d always disliked it. “I don’t like this,” she said slowly. “I need to consider it.”

Rumpelstiltskin reached out and slammed his book shut. “Time grows short, dearie – or rather, the Queen’s patience will. You’d best ponder quickly.”

Aura stood, brushing her skirt flat and then wincing at the feel of the rough fabric on her tender palms. Anxiety began a slow burn in her chest. Things were changing so quickly – gods, she  _never_  thought she’d hear Rumpelstiltskin say he’d let her go, even if it might be to another world. She felt like she was standing on a spinning plate, and one step in the wrong direction would tip her off into disaster.

“I will,” she said, trying to give her words the confidence that she so desperately needed. She turned her back on him and made her way down the stairs of his tower. The sound of a satisfied giggle trailed after her, and her slow retreat turned into a scrambling run as she bolted for the haven of her room.


	4. Breaking Point

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Queen is persistent, and Aura loses her temper.

The Dark Castle seemed far too confining after that kind of offer. The snows had settled in and it was foolish to try the peaks, or Aura would have escaped there to worry in private. As it was, she made a point of haunting the most disused parts of the castle, just to avoid Rumpelstiltskin. It was bad enough when they had their tea or she served supper; she felt his regard constantly, as though he were assessing goods at the marketplace. 

The revelation that he was plotting something more than just the Queen’s downfall had disturbed her greatly. She’d thought that she had a good idea of most things that he was up to, but even living together, it seemed he’d managed to conceal much from her. Aura tried to distract herself with an all-out assault on a set of dusty disused bedchambers, and when that didn’t work, she gave in and holed up in the library with copies of her best contracts, trying to work out how she might scribe such a delicate deal as her master had suggested. 

When she was anxious, Aura often found her appetite vanished and she didn’t sleep well, and her current troubles were no exception. Her dreams were haunted by visions of the Queen and her magic, oceans of ink and avalanches of parchment, and worst of all, pools of blood that tried to suck her down. She woke screaming more than once, and the rest of the time she drifted uneasily in and out of sleep, kicking the bedsheets into knots and scattering pillows everywhere. During the day, she dragged through her chores and touched as little of her meals as Rumpelstiltskin, who ate like a bird when he remembered to at all.

After a week where she had perhaps two hours’ sleep out of eight, Aura began wandering the castle’s halls. Rumpelstiltskin often kept late hours or didn’t sleep at all, but recently he’d taken to locking himself in his tower rather than haunting the Great Hall, so she took advantage of his absence and retreated there to spin. 

It was something that she usually found soothing, but now it did little to calm her nerves. Her thread came out lumpy and snarled, and she had to spend just as much time unspinning it all and re-carding the wool. Her mood was much the same, especially when dawn came and she found herself with still-raw nerves and a spindle of ragged and useless thread.

One day, not quite a fortnight later, she couldn’t stand it anymore. The icy weather outside was as foul as Aura’s mood, and Rumpelstiltskin hadn’t helped when he decided to investigate the properties of a conjuror’s hat he’d recently acquired. The odd thing, made of dark blue floppy velvet and spangled with silver stars, imparted substitutiary locomotion. Aura soon found that combined with the strength of Rumpelstiltskin’s power, it meant all the furnishings in the Castle were inclined to take on life of their own.

By teatime, she’d already got in a fight with her own broom, had to bully a suit of armor and a stuffed bear back to their stands in the foyer, ripped down half the curtains in the Great Hall when they wrapped themselves around her feet, and cleaned a whole pot of cheese curds off the kitchen ceiling, where they’d exploded and stuck as she tried to strain them from their whey. The last straw was when she loaded the tea-tray and the silverware began dancing around the plate of scones.

When she stomped into the Great Hall and slammed the tray down on the table, spoons and butter-knives scattered in all directions.  _“Rumpelstiltskin!”_  she yelled at her master, who was magicking the curtains back into one of the tall windows. “Enough! I’ve had enough!”

He paused, hands in the air as he conjured nails that drove themselves into the tops of the curtains. “Whatever do you mean, dearie?”

“This!” Aura grabbed a handful of the cutlery and shook it at him, then whirled and pitched the lot at the fireplace. “And the curtains, and the stuffed bear, and the damned cheese, and my swiving broom! I swear by all the gods and devils, if you don’t stop messing about with that hat I am going to  _shred_  it!” Her face had gone red and her eyes pale with anger, and she stamped her foot for emphasis. 

Rumpelstiltskin eyed her warily as she advanced on him. With a twist of his wrist he finished with the curtains, and then turned toward her and crossed his arms. “Perhaps you’d like to explain why you’re in such a foul mood first,” he said. 

Aura scowled. “Why do you think? You turn the castle upside-down with your conjuring and I should just smile and get on with my chores?” She was really breathing hard now, and she kept walking slowly forward, menace in her stance.

He had the gall to look confused. “It’s never bothered you before.”

 _“It’s bothering me now!”_  She’d reached one of the display tables, the one with the clock and the candlestick, and she grabbed the latter and launched it at Rumpelstiltskin’s face. She had very good aim, but he was unnaturally fast, and he caught it a bare inch from his nose.

He threw up an arm and Aura suddenly found herself hovering a few feet above the floor, stuck firmly in place and out of reach of any other throwable objects. “Enough, Aura,” he snapped, setting the candelabra back down on its table with more force than was strictly necessary. “What’s gotten into you?”

“If I knew, I wouldn’t be stuck up here, would I!” She started cursing as she struggled to free herself, but she ought to have saved her strength; Rumpelstiltskin might have to put forth more effort to get his spells to cut through her immunity to magic, but when his enchantments did work, they stuck. Finally, she stopped trying to kick her way out of thin air and heaved a sigh. “Will you let me down?”

“No.”

“I’ll stop throwing things.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Aura rubbed her eyes, almost ready to cry with frustration. If she could just get some sleep, it would be easier to keep her temper… “Look, I promise, all right? I won’t throw anything else at you today.” Even fatigue and grouchiness wouldn’t make her forget to be specific in her promises. He was Rumpelstiltskin, after all.

It seemed that was enough to mollify him. “Very well.” He waved a hand, and she dropped lightly to the floor. “What brought this on?”

She hoisted herself up on the table and rested her chin in her hands, too tired even to stand. “I can’t sleep,” she admitted. 

“I hardly think that justifies an attack.” Rumpelstiltskin stood in front of her in his favorite ‘thinking’ pose, one hand supporting the elbow of the opposite arm, and free hand under his chin. 

“I haven’t been sleeping at all,” Aura corrected herself. “And I’ve never had nightmares like these.”

“When did this start?”

“A fortnight ago.” She hesitated as a thought suddenly came to her. “After the Queen’s visit. Do you think she has something to do with it?”

Rumpelstiltskin cocked his head. “I should think my defenses are more than a match for Regina.”

“Maybe…” Aura shook her head, swinging back from anger to dejection. “I just don’t know why I’d be dreaming about her. She…well, she scares me, but not that much.”

Rumpelstiltskin was getting a suspicious look on his face. “Did you see her arrive?”

“No. She came in here, but I didn’t see if she’d been…poking around before that.” Aura slid off the table, suspecting that her thoughts were following the same path as her master’s. “My room. I didn’t check my room for magic afterward.”

“Easily done, dearie.” He snapped his fingers and whirled them off to her room. She’d deliberately chosen a chamber in the tower next to the one that held his workroom; it was close enough that she could respond to a call without traversing the entire castle, but far enough away that the occasional explosion wouldn’t disturb her too badly. Unlike the opulence of the Great Hall or the bare simplicity of Rumpelstiltskin’s bedchamber, her room was a retreat, comfortably furnished and, by mutual agreement, private. Just having her master here was a momentous event, but she had other things to dwell on at present.

Aura looked around in despair. Where would the Queen have hidden something in here – and what would she have hidden? The room wasn’t large enough to have many hiding places. Her favorite overstuffed chair and couch sat in front of the smoored fire, tapestries that she’d woven covered the walls, and a quilt she’d sewn out of fabric scraps covered the end of the bed. There were few knickknacks about, since in contrast to Rumpelstiltskin’s habit of hoarding things, she preferred to avoid clutter. The bookshelves and the basket of mending in front of the fireplace were the only exceptions.

As she hesitated, Rumpelstiltskin brushed past her and planted himself in the center of her carpet, peering about as if he’d never seen the place before – and he hadn’t been in for at least a few years, Aura realized. “Have you noticed anything different?” he demanded. “Anything moved, or missing?”

Aura shook her head. “I don’t think so. I would have noticed when I cleaned it just last week. I changed the linens, cleared the fireplace, washed the windows…” 

She trailed off as she looked at her windows, which were tall and narrow and bordered with stained glass in a rose-and-vine pattern. The leaded chips were tiny, but translucent enough to let in the sunlight she craved…all save one. Aura crossed the room and peered at the lower left corner of one pane, and there it was: in place of the green leaf that should have been there, there was instead a mirror.

The Queen, as everyone knew, spied with mirrors. It was the reason there were few in the castle. Even a bucket of water would ripple to keep a reflective surface from forming for long. For the Queen could do more than just spy with a mirror; Aura had heard whispers that she could spellcast from a distance as well. And that mirror had been in her window for weeks.

Aura let out an inarticulate sound of pure rage. She  _hated_  being played with like a toy. She grabbed a book off her shelf, ready to smash the glass with it, but a hand caught her arm before she could complete the swing. “No need to be so destructive,” Rumpelstiltskin said. “Subtlety will get you much farther.”

She shook her arm free of his grip and dropped the book on a chair. “I’d like to subtle her head right off her shoulders.”

“As amusing a scene as that would be, I doubt you’d ever get close enough to try. No, you can be cleverer than that.” Rumpelstiltskin raised his other hand, which was glowing with a spell, then reached through her window and closed his fingers around the fragment of mirror. When he drew his hand back the mirror came with it, leaving a leaf-shaped hole that filled itself with ordinary glass. He opened his fist and showed her the mirror. “What shall we do with this?”

Aura ran a hand through her curls, wondering if he meant the question to be tricky. “I get to decide?”

“Well, it seems only fair.”

She sat down on the arm of her chair and frowned at the floor. What should be done? In games of power and intimidation, keeping the upper hand was key. If she didn’t do something to answer this invasion of her home ground, the Queen would only push harder. But Aura didn’t have the kind of power she needed to compete with a sorceress. Her master, on the other hand…

She eyed the mirror, then asked, “Is there enough of that for a sympathetic spell?” Rumpelstiltskin hadn’t taught her how to perform magic, but she’d picked up a fair bit of theory by watching him work and interrogating him about his own spells. Sympathetic magic only needed a little bit of something to cast a spell over the whole, and all the better if the original bit was spelled itself; usurping an existing spell seemed to be more forceful than creating an entirely new one.

Rumpelstiltskin grinned, apparently liking the direction she was taking. “Plenty.”

Aura answered the smile with one of her own, slightly feral. No one ever won a battle through defense, and she would show this woman that she was no simpering, helpless maiden to be toyed with. “I’ve heard her castle is full of mirrors. She doesn’t need all of them, surely.” 

“Not at all.” With a flourish he set the fragment of mirror on a patch of stone floor, where it glowed faintly purple, and then flicked out a hand in invitation. “If you’ll do the honors, dearie?”

Aura stood and faced him across the mirror, then, with an air of intense satisfaction, she brought the heel of one sturdy house-boot down hard on the glass.

Rumpelstiltskin must have turned the Queen’s spy-spell back on itself, because for a moment the shards of the mirror reflected long hallways and elaborate rooms filled with mirrors exploding into thousands of pieces. A furious shriek echoed through Aura’s bedroom, but was drowned out by the crunch of glass as Aura ground her heel down even harder.

Her master clapped gleefully. “Bravo, bravo!”

Aura swept him a curtsey, grinning with the satisfaction of having gained the upper hand. Doubtless Queen Regina would take this as a personal affront, but Aura would do her best to prepare for the next assault. She had some protection from her immunity, and more from living in Rumpelstiltskin’s care – for perhaps the first time, it seemed more an advantage than a restriction. “Well,” she said, rubbing her hands together as though dusting them off. “Perhaps that will slow her down.”

Rumpelstiltskin smiled, twirling a finger theatrically. “Not for long. Regina may not be my equal in power, but she is persistent.”

“Then I’ll be ready if she tries something else.” Aura’s smile thinned in annoyance that he’d dismissed her small victory so quickly. 

“How do you plan on doing that?” he queried, stroking his chin as though fascinated with her efforts.

Aura made an irritated rumble deep in her throat. “First, I’m going to coax one of the gargoyles down off the roof so the Queen will stay the hell away from my windows.” Gargoyles made excellent guardians, though Rumpelstiltskin’s were not self-aware as they often were in stories; still, they would follow her orders if she was firm enough, and having one by her window would make her sleep much easier.

“A prudent first step,” Rumpelstiltskin allowed. “Go on.”

“We’ve got plenty of vervain. Enough for an entire winter of tea and baths besides.” Vervain was another powerful magical deterrent, although it was meant more for witches, who drew their power from the earth. Sorcerers and sorceresses worked in different ways, but they still used magic, and there was a good chance it might affect them as well. 

Her master made an encouraging gesture with his hands. “And?”

What was this, a test? Aura supposed it was; perhaps he wanted to see how much she had retained of the knowledge she’d wheedled out of him over the years. “I expect it’s time to start wearing my tessen more often.” The  _tessen_  was a fan he’d brought back from a far-off land, and the only weapon he had agreed to allow her, after he’d caught her raiding his armory when she was twelve. The fan, a concession to Rumpelstiltskin’s odd ideas of how a lady ought to behave, was made with sharpened steel ribs and silk, and as heavy as a dagger. 

“Hmm. Inelegant, but…effective.” 

“I don’t care if it’s inelegant as long as it works. She’s flesh and blood like anyone, isn’t she?” She stalked over to the chest that sat at the foot of her bed, yanked open the lid and rummaged through it until she found the fan, wrapped securely in a length of linen. She pulled the wrapping off and flicked her wrist, spreading the fan fully. The steel glinted in the light from the window.

“Have you kept in practice, dearie?”

Aura caught his mischievous tone, and her head snapped up just in time to see him throw something at her. She reacted with the instinct of long practice and snapped the fan up to intercept the missile, then scissored it shut with both hands. The motion was one she’d quickly learned when Rumpelstiltskin had decided that teaching her to use the tessen meant enchanting the castle’s suits of armor and weaponry to attack her without notice. She was grateful she hadn’t forgotten it, as the splintered halves of a crossbow bolt fell lightly to the carpet. 

That didn’t mean she was amused at her master’s antics. “That was hardly necessary!” she snapped, glaring at Rumpelstiltskin, who was giggling and bouncing on his toes.

“Oh, of course it was, dearie. You’ll need to keep your wits about you if you want to best nasty old Regina. She plays for keeps.” He spun on his heel and made for her door. “Now, if we’re quite finished here, I’ve an experiment to attend to.”

“Not with that hat again,” Aura warned. “Not if you want supper tonight. I can’t cook if the cutlery won’t stay still.”

He glanced back over his shoulder. “Since tea was in no fit state to drink this afternoon, I suppose I can confine myself to the workroom. You might apply yourself to your contract, little goldfinch. You’ve been neglecting it of late, and Regina will be no happier after that little trick.” 

Aura glared at his back as he left the tower. He would always have the last word, and throw in her least favorite nickname to boot. But he was right; the Queen would know what had prompted the shattering of her mirrors, and take it as the declaration of war that it was. Aura’s sleep might be safe for now, but that was no guarantee that the rest of her would be. 

She used the hearth-broom to sweep the glittering shards of mirror into the heart of the fire, and then stuffed her tessen under her belt and went to look through their herb-stores for the vervain.


	5. Blood Magic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aura runs out of time, and Rumpelstiltskin proceeds with his plan…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Possible triggers for blood/cutting.

Midwinter approached. Aura’s sleep was no longer haunted by the Queen’s nightmares, but despite being able to rest undisturbed, her nerves were no less frayed. 

The turning of the year was not a quiet time in the Dark Castle. Rumpelstiltskin performed many of his darkest rituals when the days grew short and nighttime ruled the mountains. This year, it seemed, he wanted to do something that was necessary for building his curse; midwinter was one of the times when the barriers between worlds were thinner, according to him, and he wanted to test how to pierce them.

Because her immunity offered her some protection from the effects of his conjuring, he’d demanded that Aura assist him. Aura found this less than appealing, since long experience of assisting in midwinter spells had taught her that they usually involved staying up long into the night and standing around in the middle of the woods in knee-deep snow. Rumpelstiltskin, being other than human, might not feel the cold and wind, but she had no such resistance and she wasn’t thrilled.  

The Queen’s meddling had left her no more sanguine about her safety than before, and she had been working feverishly in the weeks before midwinter to build a contract for Rumpelstiltskin’s curse. Aura wasn’t convinced she would do well to accept his deal, but she was pragmatic if nothing else; she knew it might come to the point when it was her only safe haven. Better to arrange a little insurance for herself than be caught up in the curse with no promise of protection. 

Still, though she had been scribing contracts for years and was no stranger to Rumpelstiltskin’s twisted sense of fairness, Aura could not arrange the words of her deal to her satisfaction. There was always some clause that was still too ambiguous, a wording that made her nervous, a complication she knew she wasn’t anticipating. Rumpelstiltskin had seen her efforts and made his own changes – she left the document out on her worktable in the library, and she would come back to it after a day or two and find edits in his scratchy, cramped handwriting. 

Each one rankled at her as it set her progress back, like taking a step up a slippery hillside only to slide downhill twice as far. She was too stubborn and too suspicious of his motives to give in to his every whim when it came to building this deal, but she had learned over the years that it was hard to win a fight with Rumpelstiltskin. He almost always got his way…no matter who it hurt. 

She was determined she wouldn’t come out of this deal at a disadvantage. But by midwinter’s eve, she had made much less progress than she had hoped. The framework of the deal was set, but the wording was not, and with Rumpelstiltskin words were everything. Intent, no matter how well understood it was on both sides of the signature, was meaningless. 

She was still hunched over the parchment when he came to collect her for his ritual. “Enough of that, dearie,” he said, plucking the quill from her hand and depositing it in a cup on the desk. “It grows late, and we need to reach the clearing soon.”

Aura made a face. In order to keep his more complicated conjuring pure, he usually refused to transport them to the clearing he used for these rituals, explaining that all magic left traces behind that could contaminate a delicate spell. That meant walking – and carrying anything to be used in the work. And since Rumpelstiltskin wore magic like a second skin, whose job was it going to be to do the carrying? She slid off her stool and began armoring herself against the cold from the pile of winter clothing that was draped over one of the library chairs. “Will we be out long?”

“Oh, all night, I expect,” Rumpelstiltskin said airily, waving a hand in a dismissive gesture. He was wearing his favorite dragon-skin coat and a heavy pair of boots with his leathers, though his ensemble was hardly adequate for the bitter cold of a mountain night.

Aura, who had absolutely no intention of showing off how tough she was, was busy pulling on a second, knitted tunic over her thick stockings, multiple skirts and woolen undertunic. Her boots had heavy soles and were fleece-lined, as were her mittens and hat. She hated being cold. Her heavy cloak and an incongruously fluffy scarf that she had knitted as a child went on over the tunic, and she thrust her hands into her mittens with brisk motions. “Is the basket still in the Great Hall?” she demanded, voice muffled a bit by the scarf.

“Just as you left it.” He held the door of the library open for her and bowed solicitously. “After you, dearie.”

She sighed and flapped a mittened hand at him as she passed, knowing his solicitousness was as much an act as his moods ever were. “Did you at least pack me a flask of tea this time? I’ll be asleep halfway through without it.” She had once fallen asleep during a midnight conjuring, and one of the beasts that Rumpelstiltskin had called up had half-strangled her before he’d intervened. Had she been awake, he’d claimed crossly, she could have fought it off herself.

Rumpelstiltskin patted one of the deep pockets of his coat. “There’s a flask.” 

“Good.” The library wasn’t far from the Hall, and they reached it in minutes; she retrieved the pack, which was an old laundry basket she’d sewn straps and a leather lid to, and slung it over her back. Rumpelstiltskin kept his distance, but opened the doors for her as they left the Hall and made their way down through the lower levels of the castle. They exited into the gardens and passed through the north gate, which faced the woods. 

Not wanting to use magic near the spelling area, Rumpelstiltskin had not melted a path through the most recent snowpack, and it came nearly to his knees; on Aura, it was thigh-deep and a difficult slog. She scowled under her scarf and vowed, not for the first time, that she was going to get him to learn how to use a shovel. 

The stars glittered sharply overhead; this high in the mountains the air was thin, and the night was clear and cloudless. It was also very cold, and Aura could feel the bite of the wind even through her multiple layers. Snow was starting to work its way into her boots even though she was following the path that Rumpelstiltskin was breaking through the woods. In short, she was quickly growing chilled, tired and grouchy – which was a fairly normal state of affairs for a midwinter conjuring. 

They reached the clearing, which was fortunately well-sheltered by trees and somewhat less buried in snow. Rumpelstiltskin and Aura tamped down a clear space, spiraling inward in a clockwise direction until they met at the center of the clearing. There Aura set down her basket and began to unpack it, arranging its contents in neat rows on the compacted snow. When she finished, Rumpelstiltskin had made a smaller circle under a tree at the edge of the clearing, and a heavy stoneware flask was sitting there.

Aura’s duties were done, and she left the main circle for her allotted space. The lid of the flask doubled as a cup, and she sat down, removed the inner cork and poured out a cup of steaming tea. It was blissfully hot and she held it under her nose as she watched Rumpelstiltskin go about his preparations. They hadn’t spoken since leaving the castle, as was often the case at times when he insisted on her participation in his spell-casting. Talking was distracting when he was doing delicate work, and she didn’t want to be at the center of a failed spell. 

He fiddled with his supplies, combining ingredients in a bowl carved of black glassy stone from a fire mountain. They began to swirl and smoke, and Aura’s nose was flooded with a hodgepodge of scents, all overlain by the ashes-and-gold smell of Rumpelstiltskin’s magic. She wrinkled her nose in distaste and breathed shallowly through her mouth, not wanting to start sneezing. 

Rumpelstiltskin flung up his arms and the contents of the bowl exploded into the air and hung there. His back was to her, so some of her view was blocked, but she could see when the droplets spread into a shimmering, rippling surface that glowed brightly. She could just barely see through the portal to what was beyond, but she found herself gaping at the images that swam there: tall buildings, strange carriages that moved without horses, hordes of people scurrying about on stone pathways. Aura had never encountered the like, not in all the books in the library or in the tales her master had told of his deals, and she stared, fascinated.

Rumpelstiltskin spread his arms wider and the images flickered faster. Soon they paused no more than an instant, passing so quickly that she could glean no more than an impression of each before it was gone. The cup of tea rested unheeded in her hands, cooling in the bitterly cold air, but she paid it no mind. Rumpelstiltskin had always warned her away from portals, and she’d taken his warning to heart. This was the first time in years she’d seen one firsthand. 

Aura was so caught up in watching the portal that she barely registered the tree shuddering, once, behind her. Rumpelstiltskin worked with powerful forces, and she normally paid no mind to a little shaking. But when it repeated again, stronger, and was accompanied by a high belling sound like a horn blaring, she gasped and shot to her feet. 

She didn’t dare disturb her master when he plied such terrible energies, but she looked around the clearing frantically, swearing at her own folly in leaving the castle without a weapon. Just because she was immune to magic didn’t mean that she couldn’t be hurt, and though Rumpelstiltskin’s defenses usually kept out intruders, it was possible that something had passed the border without his knowledge.

There it was again, the horn, but now she heard howling and a thunderous pounding, and the wind was growing stronger. Aura fought to keep her cloak wrapped around her as an icy wind swept down from the peaks, swirling the snow up from the ground. Soon everything had gone white, so white that she could barely make out the outline of the portal anymore, and she panicked. This was no side effect of the spell. “Rumpelstiltskin!” she cried.

There was no answer, even though he was only yards away. The wind buffeted her, tearing her suddenly numb fingers away from the tree and spinning her this way and that; she tried to resist it, not wanting to stumble into the portal by accident, but it was no use. 

And then her blood froze in her veins, for the snow suddenly parted and she was face-to-face with a cavalcade – horses and dogs and shadowy riders, all pounding straight at her. She had time only to see that they were all black as night and had blank white eyes before Aura flung herself flat on the ground, expecting to be trampled. 

But she wasn’t. They passed over her, and she heard laughter so terrible that it hurt her ears.

Aura scrambled to her feet and ran, not caring what direction she was going or what she might hit. Trees careened past her like ghosts and her breath sobbed in her chest. If they caught her, she knew something awful would happen. She could feel it like a lump of ice in the pit of her stomach, and her instincts – honed by years of living amidst dark magics – were rarely wrong.

As she ran, the pounding returned, and her eyes widened with terror as she saw the hunters pacing her. Their eyes were milky and blank but all the more horrible for the merciless intent they held. She tried to veer away, but they were on both sides of her now, and the ground was rising; she’d run out of valley and gone up one of the mountain slopes, and she knew she was dead. There was no way she could outpace a normal horse and rider on a slope, much less ones that ran through the air.

_“Aura!”_

Rumpelstiltskin’s voice! She couldn’t spare a breath to reply but altered her course, reaching deep inside her for one last burst of speed. The snow had risen again and blinded her to all but the hunters, so she didn’t see her master until she was almost upon him.

All at once he was there, half-crouched in her path. He had an arm outstretched and snagged her with it as she cannoned into him, letting her momentum swing them both around in a circle suddenly crackled with magic. The snow vanished as they whirled through the confusion of a transport spell, and suddenly all the light was gone too, flickering into a darkness so black it almost hurt to look at it. 

Aura staggered and fell hard on her hands and knees, slamming into what felt like a stone wall. The wind was gone and it was warmer here, but she couldn’t see a thing. “Light,” she rasped, her chest heaving as she tried to catch her breath. Her eyes were straining for even a spark, a glimmer of light, but there was nothing, and that did little to help the state of her nerves, already shattered by the chase.

“A moment,” Rumpelstiltskin snapped. Flame flared as he plucked a torch from the air, and Aura could finally see where they were: a cave. Not a large one, but she recognized it from her wanderings in the mountains, from the way that the stone seemed to flow over two huge boulders at her shoulder. It was those she had struck on landing.

“Why here?” she demanded, trying to shake off the disorientation that traveling by magic always brought. It wasn’t easy, considering that she could hardly breathe, and she clutched at the wall to keep dizziness from overwhelming her.

“It was the best I could manage,” her master replied, straightening from his crouch and settling his clothing about him with sharp movements. “That was no illusion I just saved you from.”

Aura dragged herself upright and faced him. “Those hunters – ”

“A Wild Hunt.” Aura blanched. She’d read the stories of those hunts – led by dark beings who passed through barriers in the mortal world like cobwebs, such chases never ended well for the prey. And there were few ways to stop them.

Rumpelstiltskin seized her wrist and pulled her away from the wall, heading deeper into the cave with long strides that she struggled to match. “The Queen is chafing at my delay, and smarting from your choice to destroy her mirrors. She’s got it into her head that you know enough of my secrets to be used as leverage, and she sent the Wild Hunt after you. But I need you more. Without your contribution, the curse will be too much of a trap.”

“Can’t you stop the Hunt?” 

“Some things are beyond even my powers, dearie. Once the Wild Hunt is set loose nothing will stay it – save taking its quarry.”

Aura swore, her wrist shaking in Rumpelstiltskin’s grip. He ignored it and kept walking, holding the torch high above his head to light the way. “Then what are we doing?” she demanded, frightened nearly to her wits’ end. 

“Enacting our deal. If you want to live to see another dawn, that is.”

“Pox and murrain,” Aura muttered unhappily. She wasn’t ready for this. She hadn’t had time to work out the terms, to scribe it properly; the deal was little more than a collection of half-considered clauses outlining a bargain she didn’t yet understand fully. “I haven’t decided! I need more time!”

Her master glanced back at her as they descended deeper into the dry cave. “Your time is up. Are you going to spend the rest of your life hiding from Regina, or will you set the path of your own fate?”

He knew how to play on her fears, the old trickster. If there was anything she wanted as much as she desired freedom, it was safety. The Queen had tried to steal her heart, break her with nightmares, and now she’d sent the Hunt – and there was nothing Aura could do to ward off the attacks. She was entirely dependent on Rumpelstiltskin for magical protection, unless she took his offer and let him send them all to a world without magic. There she would have a chance to thwart Regina on more equal footing. 

Was she coward enough to throw away that chance, and hide behind Rumpelstiltskin for the rest of her life?

No. She was tired of being a victim, and she was tired of letting Rumpelstiltskin control her. She was no coward, and she would have her freedom, no matter how brief.

“Yes,” she snarled, grabbing his arm and stopping him. “I’ll do it. I’ll sign the contract. I’ll take the deal. And you’d better keep up your end.”

He smiled wickedly; that should have been warning enough. But although Aura knew she was playing into his hands once more, she couldn’t give up even the slightest chance to be free of him….and he had promised that if she helped him defeat Regina, she would be. “Grand,” he said. “Shall we move on?”

Aura released his arm and joined him once more in the descent through the cave. “You still haven’t told me how I’ll be taking part in this.”

“Blood magic can’t be taught, dearie. It’s taken by force.” He touched something at his belt, and as the light caught it she saw that it was the hilt of his dagger, the wickedly curved one carved with his name. She knew it had something to do with his power, but she had always been too wary of it to ask for its story. The thing scared her; it had always smelled of old blood, even when she could see that it was clean. “You’ll find out soon enough,” he added ominously.

They walked for a while in silence, going much farther than she had bothered to explore, until they reached an echoing chamber. Aura could only see so far in the torchlight, but when she discerned the outline of the long, flat stone that stood at hip-height, she stopped short. There were dark shadows on the stone, shadows that didn’t go away when her master brought the torch closer, and the smell of old blood was so thick that it nearly choked her. “Blood magic,” she whispered, shuddering as sickening wave of fear rolled down her spine. 

Rumpelstiltskin turned back to look at her and smiled, and his eyes were so dark that she could hardly make them out. “Frightened?”

Oh gods, she was a fool, a  _fool_. “I’m not a coward,” she said, her voice shaking. 

He planted the torch in a crack in the cave wall. “No, that you are not.” In one of those unsettling bursts of speed he was capable of, he backed her up against the cave wall and pinned her arms at her sides. “But are you determined to see this through?” he whispered against her cheek.

Aura could see little but the glitter of his cheek and the silver strands in his hair, but she could feel his breath on her skin, and the tone of his voice chilled her blood. “I never break a bargain,” she said vehemently, fighting her fear. “You taught me that.”

“Bravo, Aura,” he said, pulling away. She took a few deep breaths, trying to keep her stomach from flipping over. She  _would_  go through with this. She had given her word. 

When she had collected herself once more, he was standing next to the altar, bowing solicitously. “If you please,” he added, gesturing. A large, black glass bowl winked into being on the dark-stained stone slab. Another gesture and he held an empty drop spindle in his hand, painted or stained a flat and sinister black. The dagger was still strapped to his belt at his right hand; between it and the altar, the stench of blood had grown almost overwhelming.

She took a deep breath. She didn’t trust him – she hadn’t, not since she was quite young – but he didn’t break bargains. That didn’t mean she would enjoy what was about to happen. Slowly, she walked to the altar and faced her master. “What must I do?”

“First, our contract.” He flicked out a hand and the parchment she’d worked so hard to scribe unrolled from it. He set it on the altar, and she peered closely at it, checking to see that none of the terms had changed. She wasn’t happy with the state of the thing; it was too loosely worded, too easy to twist into something different. But if Rumpelstiltskin was right, she didn’t have any more time to revise it. When she looked up at him, he was offering a black quill – a raven’s feather – and smiling. “Ladies first.”

Aura stripped off the outer layers of her winter clothing so she could move more easily, then took the quill, and pulled her small belt-knife from its sheath. He hadn’t offered ink, which meant he intended the signature to be in blood. It was the most binding of contracts, and the most dangerous; a skilled sorcerer could kill if someone tried to break such a deal. Carefully, she made a shallow cut in her thumb, watched the blood bead up, then dipped the quill into it. Fortunately, she wouldn’t need much. Four letters and the deed was done. He’d given her no other name.

She cleaned quill and blade with a handkerchief, then offered them to her master. He made quick work of his own signing, though she watched carefully to make sure it was his true name, and that he didn’t alter it by crossing through the letters or putting a stop after it. Such techniques made a binding weaker, and if she was going through with this, she’d be damned sure he was as well.

Both names glowed briefly in fiery red, and then faded into a false black. Rumpelstiltskin handed back her knife, stuck the quill in a pocket, and carefully rolled up the contract. With a flourish he magicked it away, then turned back to her. “Sit,” he commanded, pointing to the base of the altar. She obeyed, leaning back against the stone with a shudder, and he placed the bowl in her lap. “When you wake, dearie, you won’t remember any of this. You’ll be a part of a new world, free to pursue your desires – for ten years. And after that, you will return to me.”

Her eyes widened when he drew his dagger from its belt-loop. She’d known that blood magic would be involved, but knowing and reality were wildly different. Despite her pounding heart, she sat straighter and faced him without flinching. “How will I find you?” she asked, voice tight with fear.

Her master smiled, crouching before her. “You won’t have a choice. And – ” Quicker than her eyes could follow, he snatched up her right arm and used the knife to open a deep cut. Lengthwise along her forearm, the way you were supposed to cut if you intended to kill yourself. “I expect you’ll be wanting this back.”

The knife was a quick, searing pain, and Aura cried out, but Rumpelstiltskin held her arm tight in one hand, over the bowl, until the blood began to drip off it and she stopped struggling. It was as much her own stubbornness as his inexorable grip that restrained her; she would finish what she had begun. She would not falter. She was Rumpelstiltskin’s ward, not some cringing useless girl. 

But oh, the sight of the blood filled her with such fear that she only hung on to that conviction by the barest thread.

Rumpelstiltskin set the knife on the altar and lifted the spindle, which had a black silk leader already attached. Aura’s breathing had become erratic and shallow as the blood drained from her wrist, but her master wasn’t paying attention to her – his eyes were only for the dark liquid gathering in the bowl. When he judged the level high enough, he reached out and pinched the blood between his fingers and spun it, like he would spin fiber. It rose in a glittering rope from the bowl and he joined it to the leader, then gave the spindle a twist and let it drop. The blood followed, twining itself into a slick dark thread that wrapped around the spindle of its own accord.

Everything was starting to get cold. Her skin felt like ice was creeping over it; all the color had gone, save for the glints of firelight on the blood that dripped from her wrist. She was gasping for air, but it seemed like her lungs couldn’t draw enough. Her flesh began to prickle and burn, and that was when panic began to really set in.

She knew the taste of death, the scent. An unfortunate incident when she was seven had given her indelible memories of what it felt like to pass close to death. It was what she sensed now, and it was all she could do not to upset the bowl, clamp her hand down on the cut and stem the flow of blood. She didn’t know how much she’d lost, but it must be too much…“Our deal,” she gasped, looking up at Rumpelstiltskin with desperation in her eyes and voice. “You can’t let me die!”

He was still watching the spindle turn. “Don’t fret, little goldfinch. I’m nearly done.” A few agonizing moments later, he twitched the spindle up in the air and caught it, breaking the thread as he did. The blood snaked back to her wrist and the wound flared with heat, sealing itself as she watched. 

The spindle was now tightly, thickly wound with a dark thread that gleamed like the heart of a ruby – the blood that should have been in her veins. “There!” Rumpelstiltskin exclaimed, holding it up to the light. 

But the cold had not retreated, and now a grey fog was creeping in around the edges of her vision. She tried to shift the bowl from her lap and found that she could barely lift her hands. “Rumpelstiltskin!” Aura breathed, too faintly to be a sob.

He turned his gaze on her, then knelt once more and picked up the bowl, empty but for a dark sheen of liquid, and set it aside.  But if she’d thought that he was going to comfort her, she was wrong. He only smiled, watching her unblinkingly as she struggled to breathe, trying desperately to keep her eyes open. 

She could feel consciousness slithering away from her, and soon it was too hard to keep breathing, keep fighting the darkness, and that was when she felt Rumpelstiltskin’s hand against her cheek. It was rough, and warm, the only point of warmth left. She should have been shocked, for he rarely touched her…but the darkness was too enticing, stealing her will and her breath together.

Just before her eyes closed, she heard him murmur, “All magic comes with a price, dearie.”

* * *

Rumpelstiltskin watched as a purple glow swept out from his hand and blanketed Aura’s body, catching hold just as the first brush of death touched her. She froze, not so much as a hair drifting out of place or an eyelash shifting; the spell took solidly, settling over her like a blanket. He slipped his hands under her shoulders and knees and carefully lifted her, then set her on top of the altar. His movements were gentle as he folded her hands together over her middle, arranged her wild curls around her face, straightened her skirts and brushed a bit of dirt off her sleeves. Oddly gentle, for a man who’d just slashed her wrist and bled her until she was half-dead.

The air over the altar shimmered once when he was finished, and Aura lay still and cold and white as marble beneath the spell’s protection. The blood had flaked away from her wrist and the scar was as pale as if it had been healing for months, but there was no mistaking her for a healthy, living woman. She was caught somewhere in between life and death, and she would stay that way until the curse was cast. It would stymie the Wild Hunt neatly, for they only pursued living prey and had no interest in one whose soul hovered in between the realms of the living and the dead. And Regina, who had never grasped the subtleties of such sleeping spells, would never be able to track her down.

He turned away, holding the spindle up to the light and examining its precious contents. The silken thread glowed, flashing red in the torchlight, and he smiled in satisfaction. The Queen’s machinations had necessitated urgency in this matter, but now that Aura was safely out of reach, he could finish his masterwork at his leisure. Aura wouldn’t notice even if it took him years; until the curse took hold, she would be as deathless as he.

Regina would back off to plot quietly once she realized she couldn’t use Aura against him, and he could get back to work on the final components of the curse. There was still one very important bit missing, and it would be a challenge such as he had never faced before; no one had yet managed to bottle the most powerful of magics. 

But he would. He had, after all, just gathered the means to make himself immune to the curse’s effects.

He slipped the spindle into a pocket of his coat and took the torch from its crack. Only the faint glow of his spell lit the room when he left, and as he walked the very stone itself closed behind him, knitting together as if the passage had never existed. 


	6. Confluence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aura comes to Storybrooke.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This takes place about half a year before Emma's arrival in town. Aura is just about Emma's age here, and she's had her ten years in the 'real world' (more on how that works in the next few chapters).

A small bell rang when Aura pushed open the door to the pawnshop. Despite the large front window, it held more of a gloomy, brooding look of an antique store than the fluorescent-lit, seedy places that she was used to. The merchandise around her confirmed the impression. There were family heirlooms here, heavy wooden furniture and cases of jewelry and china, shelves of books and a few mismatched chandeliers. One wall was taken up by a display of stringed instruments; a case of wicked-looking knives shared a counter with an ancient cash register. The other walls were covered with old-fashioned damask wallpaper, where they were not hidden by shelves or paintings. Altogether, not what she had expected – but it was nicer by far than she had hoped, and the quality of the merchandise was high enough to make her optimistic about her employment prospects. 

“Hello?” she ventured, peering into the gloom. Shifting her briefcase into a position less likely to knock anything over, she made her way farther into the shop. “Is anyone here?” 

“Good afternoon,” a man’s voice said from her left. She turned and found the speaker – a slender man, middling tall and perhaps in his forties, with long hair, dark brown eyes, and a slightly beaky nose. His bland smile revealed a gold-capped tooth as he rested his hands on the counter he’d been polishing.

“Good afternoon to you,” she replied. “Are you the owner of the shop? I’ve come about the bookkeeping position Mr. Gold advertised for.”

“Ah, yes. I had been hoping for a response. I’m Mr. Gold,” the man said, coming out from behind the counter and offering a hand. She noticed that he limped a little, and noted the cane leaning against a shelf; obviously he didn’t need it for short distances. His accent was Scottish; Glaswegian, in fact, which she only knew because she had a hint of one herself, acquired from a nanny when she was young. His was softened somewhat, and the impression of polish was helped by the splendid black pinstripe suit he wore, set off by an expensive blue silk tie that matched his shirt exactly.

She brightened a bit, thinking that anyone who could afford that outfit was certainly doing well businesswise. She returned the handshake, which was just firm enough. A good businessman’s handshake, not limp or overly tight. “My name is Aurelia Grey, but everyone calls me Aura. I saw your position advertised in a Portland newspaper, and I hope it’s not too presumptuous to say that I would be an excellent fit.” The ad had requested a response in person, which she found odd, but something had drawn her to it nonetheless.

Mr. Gold released her hand and glanced her over politely, avoiding the usual up-and-down that men subjected women to. She’d taken a little extra care with her appearance today: smart suit, crisp blouse, simple jewelry and a neat bun in her hair, portraying what she hoped would be a tidy and responsible employee.

Mr. Gold looked like he would demand it, if his clothing was anything to judge by. He himself was proving somewhat harder to read, though. He had an interesting face – not a typically handsome one, but there was something about him that she found attractive. _Charisma_ , she thought. This was a man who had a gift of capturing and holding someone’s attention. But there was a hard edge under that, and she thought she recognized it: ruthlessness. He knew exactly what kind of effect his persona had, and how to use it to his advantage.

She was intrigued by that. Empathy could be a disadvantage in the business world, she’d found, and success rarely went hand-in-hand with popularity. She’d always tried to balance the two, but every once in a while she came across someone who refused to sacrifice the former for the latter, and she could never help but harbor a sneaking admiration for their resolve.

He smiled at her again, and this time it made it all the way to his eyes. “I assume you have accounting experience, Miss Grey?”

“Oh, yes. Accounting and contracts – I had a broad education. I’ve had several years of consulting experience with firms in Boston, but I’ve been looking for a quieter setting to spend time in for a while, and Storybrooke was an appealing option.” Aura reached into her bag and pulled out a copy of her resume. “My references are on the last page.”

Mr. Gold retrieved his cane with his free hand and motioned her toward a curtained doorway. “I would be delighted to look them over. May I offer you some tea while I read this?”

“Thank you,” she replied. “I’d love some tea.” She followed him through the curtain, finding that it was hiding a cluttered workroom. The long, high-ceilinged chamber was filled with all manner of treasures, repair projects, bits of furniture, sewing supplies, and smelled strongly of wood polish and for some reason, lanolin. Aura waited while Mr. Gold unearthed a chair from a pile of leather bookbinding supplies, then took her seat and watched the shopkeeper assemble a tray of tea things, heating water in an electric kettle and pulling a proper teapot and strainer from a cabinet behind his desk. When she saw the tin he’d selected, she hummed in appreciation. “It’s been a long time since I’ve had Scottish Breakfast,” she said happily.

He raised an eyebrow. “Most people find it an acquired taste.”

Aura shrugged. “I started young.”

He arranged the tray to his satisfaction and set it on the desk, then picked up her resume while he waited for the tea to steep. “I had wondered if there might be a family connection, from your accent.”

“Oh, that.” She _did_ have a faint Scottish accent, but not for the reasons people assumed. “Not exactly. My family’s from New Hampshire, but I had a nanny from Glasgow when I was very young, and I must have picked it up from her. I’ve never been to Scotland.”

Mr. Gold looked thoughtful. “Curious,” he said.

She smiled a little. “Curiosity killed the cat, Mr. Gold.”

“And satisfaction brought it back,” he added, finishing the adage. That in itself surprised her – people rarely knew the whole saying. But he was also watching her carefully now, and there was something…odd…in his eyes. Recognition, almost, but that was impossible.

“The position is a bit unorthodox,” he said after a moment. “There will be bookkeeping for the store, of course, but I also maintain a number of rental properties and serve as the town loan officer. I’ve been finding of late that my filing system isn’t satisfactory for dealing with the contracts, and the accounts have become complicated enough that they’re taking me away from my retail and management responsibilities.”

Aura raised her eyebrows at the odd combination of tasks, but couldn’t help but cheer internally; he’d just described precisely the kind of tangle that she specialized in. “I think you’ll find that I’m well-qualified to help you sort that out,” she said, using her most competent businesswoman’s voice. “I’ve designed financial systems for a number of clients with similar concerns.”

Mr. Gold had judged the tea properly steeped, and poured out two cups before returning to the resume. She accepted her cup, sipped at the tea, and made a sound of appreciation at the familiar, strong blend.

The shopkeeper read through her resume thoroughly while sipping at his own tea and Aura occupied herself with surveying the contents of the room. In truth, she wasn’t sure what she was going to do if he didn’t want her services; she’d left Boston without much of a plan beyond trying for this job, something that was highly uncharacteristic of her. But something about this job had compelled her, and she found herself hoping he wouldn’t reject her application.

When he looked up once more, she sat at attention and returned her cup and saucer to the desk, awaiting his pronouncement. "Judging by this impressive document, Miss Grey, I believe you may be just what I’m looking for." He set the paper down. "Would a trial engagement suit you? One month on a full-time basis, and I can also arrange living accommodations, if you haven’t already done so."

Aura's brows went up again. "Isn't that a bit unusual?"

"I lease the town’s boarding-house," Mr. Gold replied. "It would be no trouble at all to reserve you a room. If that is amenable, of course.”

She considered for a moment. It didn’t make much sense to rent an apartment for just a month, even if she could find one that wouldn’t insist on a year’s lease. She also didn’t have much in the way of belongings; a room in a boarding-house would accommodate her easily. “I believe it would be. I assume it would involve a corresponding reduction of my salary?”

“Indeed. Shall we move on to the question of your compensation?”

She smiled. Haggling – or negotiation, to put a more professional spin on it – was one of her favorite activities. "This is a schedule of my normal fees," she said, pulling another sheet from her bag and presenting it to him. "As I don't primarily deal in domestic contracts, those prices are somewhat more flexible. Given your offer of accommodations, it would be appropriate for me to discount the overall figure by a reasonable cost-of-living," she added.

Mr. Gold's mouth turned up in what was almost a smile. "Very bold, Miss Grey," he said, studying the paper. “Aren’t you going to wait until I make an offer?”

Aura prepared to stand her ground. She knew she was an expensive asset, but given her employment record, she could also justify the prices. "Everything comes with a price. I make it a point to know the value of my services," Aura replied, then took a breath and plunged on. "And unless I miss my guess, Mr. Gold, you should have no trouble with my fees."

This time, the smile was real, and accompanied by a delighted laugh. "You’re a woman after my own heart." He set the paper down and then extended a hand across the table. "I find your terms quite acceptable, my dear. Do we have a deal?"

Aura clasped his hand. "I’m your woman, Mr. Gold, once it’s all down on paper."

Had she not been listening carefully, she might have missed his murmur. "Yes, you are."

"Pardon?"

"Nothing," he said more clearly. "Would you care to view your accommodations before we write up the contract?"

She nodded, standing. "If you have time, of course."

Gold stood as well. "One of the advantages of self-employment is that my time is entirely my own. Or, in this case, yours. After you, Miss Grey."

She ducked back through the curtain and waited for Gold to retrieve his cane. Her eyes rested on the far wall, the one covered with instruments, and she sighed faintly. "No second thoughts, I hope," Mr. Gold said, coming to stand beside her.

"Oh, no," Aura said. "I was just admiring your instruments - particularly the mandolin. It's been years since I've seen the bowl-back kind."

"I doubt there are more than three people in this town that would recognize one. Do you play?"

"Almost anything with strings," she replied. “I’m not a professional, but I used to make extra money in college by playing for parties and weddings. I learned to do repairs, too.” Aura smiled a little, sadly. “I’m afraid those aren’t skills I get much use out of anymore.”

"Perhaps you will have opportunity to put both to use in Storybrooke," Mr. Gold said, moving to open the door for her. "We appreciate a good performance here, although I fear we don't get many visiting artists."

She shrugged. "If our agreement works out, Mr. Gold, perhaps I’ll be able to play for pleasure again."

As they stepped outside together, Aura noticed a tall black-haired woman heading down the sidewalk in their direction. Her clothes were exquisite, a tailored and clearly expensive suit wrapping her like a glove and a pair of killer heels adding inches to her height. Her hair and makeup were impeccable, her hands manicured and her jewelry anything but costume. The look on her face, however, indicated trouble; Aura had seldom seen such a predatory smile.

“Mayor Mills,” Mr. Gold said, drawing out the name. “So lovely to see you. I hope you won’t mind if we don’t stay to chat; I’m on a business errand.”

The woman moved subtly to block him, which Aura noted with interest. “I wouldn’t dream of letting you get away without introducing me to this lovely young woman,” the Mayor said, offering a hand to Aura. “We don’t often get visitors, Miss…?”

“Grey. Aurelia Grey,” Aura said, finding the handshake just a little too aggressive – the woman was strung so tight she twanged. “Actually, I hope to spend some time here, Mayor Mills. Mr. Gold and I have just been discussing it.”

“Oh, really?” This was obviously cause for suspicion, and Aura had to wonder what kind of relationship the two had. It wasn’t made of sunshine and flowers, that was for sure.

Aura smiled, showing all of her excellent teeth in an expression that was meant to throw the woman off guard. She didn’t care for being intimidated. “I’m surprised my appearance is so remarkable. Surely Storybrooke isn’t _that_ isolated.”

The Mayor’s mask of courtesy slipped when at Aura’s smile, but she recovered quickly, though the look in her dark eyes was more guarded than before. “We’re a quiet community, Miss Grey, and not really used to…disruptions.”

Aura glanced at the man by her side, but he showed no inclination to interrupt the verbal sparring. “Well, I’ll do my best not to disturb the peace.”

She could practically see the mask go back on when the Mayor smiled again. “Yes, I’m sure we would _all_ appreciate that.” The woman’s eyes flicked briefly to Mr. Gold, and Aura detected more than a hint of wariness in them this time.

Mr. Gold had been watching the two of them with interest, but now he stepped to one side and made a gesture ushering the Mayor past. “Of course. _Please_ don’t let us delay you, Regina; I’m sure you have other business to attend to today.”

The Mayor looked as if she’d swallowed a lemon, but backed down. The woman obviously considered herself in charge, but Mr. Gold had been able to make her acquiesce. She was wary of him…but why? “Welcome to Storybrooke,” the Mayor said with a poor attempt at another smile to Aura. “I think you’ll find it an interesting place.”

“Thanks. I’m sure I will,” Aura replied sweetly. Watching as the mayor stalked away down the street, she added quietly, “She doesn’t like you very much, does she?”

The shopkeeper looked at her sideways. “We have our little disagreements. The consequence of living in a small, isolated town, I’m afraid.” He indicated that they should start walking down the street. “The inn is just a few blocks this way. I wonder, Miss Grey, what brought you here, when your credentials are fine enough to secure you any position you liked in Boston.”

Aura shrugged. “Boston is just a place,” she said. “I have no particular ties there. And I’ve never been much of a city person – they’re too crowded. A little isolation suits me just fine.”

“Indeed,” he replied, almost to himself, as they made their way down the street. Had she glanced to her side, she would have seen that Mr. Gold had the hint of a smile playing on his lips…and perhaps wondered why.


	7. Bewrapt in webbes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aura finds that Storybrooke isn't the escape she hoped for.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title of this chapter comes from the "Queen Elstride" poem in the Mirror for Magistrates, a collection of poetry by (I think) William Baldwin, John Higgins, and Richard Niccols. Tudor stuff.
> 
> Possible triggers for suicide attempts and trauma (car accident).

_O wretched wight bewrapt in webbes of woe_  
 _That still in dread wast tost from place to place,_  
 _And neuer foundest meane to end thy race…_

The room in Granny’s Bed and Breakfast was comfortably furnished, although a little chintzier than Aura cared for. The landlady – Granny, she presumed – was polite, though just as wary of Mr. Gold as the Mayor had been. There was something very odd going on beneath the placid surface of this town, and it seemed as though Aura had inserted herself into the middle of a power struggle. Why were people afraid of her employer, and why was the Mayor so interested in one unassuming visitor?

Well, she’d decided to write and sign that contract, and that committed her to a stay of at least a month. Maybe that would be enough time to work out what was going on. Aura loved numbers, but deciphering relationships and situations could be just as interesting, and she had the feeling that Storybrooke held more than enough going on behind the scenes to keep her occupied for some time.

Most of all, Mr. Gold intrigued her. Even the idea that something dangerous might be lurking under his polished exterior didn’t faze her. She’d spent long enough looking out for her own welfare to know how to handle herself around such people, by balancing painstaking care with a willingness to fight back. It was vital in the cutthroat business world she’d moved through in Boston, and Aura had no qualms about defending her well-being – physical or financial – by any means necessary. 

The tight cuffs of her shirt were itching again, and she gratefully released the buttons. Aurelia Grey never wore short sleeves or revealing tops, because most people found scarring as extensive as hers a little off-putting. 

‘Extensive’ meant deep grooves and jagged swathes of pale skin that wrapped around her collarbone, shoulders and down her arms, with a few scattered along her legs for good measure. She didn’t like to look at them herself, especially the one long, deep lengthwise slash on her right wrist. It was in just the place you were supposed to make to commit suicide properly, and since she generally wore enough clothing to keep the rest covered, tended to startle people. 

She hated watching them jump to conclusions about it and turn pitying looks on her, but she hated explaining the mark even more. Even after a decade, the memories were just too raw. 

She’d told Gold the truth when she’d said her family was from New Hampshire, but she’d not mentioned that they were no longer alive. Her parents had owned a vineyard, and made a reasonable living of it. She’d grown up among the vines, but to her parents’ dismay, had little aptitude for viticulture or wine-making. She could tell red from white, sweet from dry, but the nuances were lost on her and she was had no interest in caring for the vines themselves.

Aura was much more fascinated by numbers – had started peeking at the account books, in fact, when she had barely begun to read. Numbers and the twisty language of contracts with their suppliers were what enthralled her, and her parents had resigned themselves to the reality that their daughter was unlikely to carry on the farming end of the business. Perhaps a grandchild, they mentioned hopefully, when she was old enough. The teenage Aura had laughed it off with a touch of embarrassment; she wasn’t anywhere near ready to think of starting a family of her own. 

It was a comfortable, unexceptional life, even when weather made harvesting dicey and there were grim conferences at the kitchen table over how to deal with the potential loss of income. Aura loved her parents in the distracted way that all teenagers do, and they weathered her prickly adolescent years patiently. She usually split her time between school and the vineyard, taking over more and more of the business end of things as she got older, and planned happily for the day when she could finally go to college and get some _real_ training. 

The winter of her seventeenth year changed everything. 

It was an icy December, good for the small crop of grapes reserved for ice wine, but it made traveling difficult. Still, she and her parents kept tradition and spent New Year’s Eve with friends of the family, leaving in the small hours of the morning so they could get back in time to prepare for the last harvest. Aura drove the truck since her parents had been drinking, and she tried to be careful. But it was late, and she was tired, and she didn’t see the black ice on the bridge a few miles from their house.

The crash was only a blur in her memory. Her seatbelt gave out, somehow, and she’d been flung through the windshield; when the paramedics found her, she’d been bleeding so badly from the cut on her wrist and the other lacerations from the glass that she was almost dead. If it hadn’t been for the cold slowing the bleeding, she would have been. 

The car plunged over the side of the bridge into the creek below, flipping on its roof. Her parents, still buckled into their seats, had no chance of escape. The paramedics wouldn’t let her see them. 

She’d spent weeks in the hospital, recovering from broken bones as well as the blood loss. Her face had escaped the worst of the scarring, but despite the best efforts of the plastic surgeons, the rest of her was a patched-together mess. The doctors had worried that she would need mental therapies as well as physical, and they were right – but it wasn’t the scarring that kept her in psychiatric care for months.

They tried to get her to stop blaming herself for the accident, but she knew they were wrong. It had been her hands on the wheel, her foot on the brake. It wasn’t survivor’s guilt when the deaths were _your_ fault. She thought about finishing the job the glass had started, and it was only the knowledge that if she failed she’d never leave the psych ward that kept her from going through with it.

Aura waited until she turned eighteen, and then checked herself out of care and firmly told her psychiatrist that she was never coming back. She went home and made arrangements to divide ownership of the vineyard between herself and the senior employees, named one of them as manager, and approved plans to renovate the house. She couldn’t bear to live in it anymore, not with the ghosts of her old life still lingering, and it would serve better as an expansion to the winery than a home. 

She’d inherited all her parents’ assets and her share in the winery gave her a reasonable allowance besides, more than enough to go to college. Since she’d been accepted early decision to Northeastern anyway she packed what possessions she cared to keep with her, consigned the rest to storage in the house, and moved to Boston. 

She could have used the new location to start over again, make friends, and build a new life. But the only thing that kept her from agonizing over the accident was work, and that left her little time for friendships. She wasn’t one for the bar-and-clubbing scene and most activities required interacting with large groups, which made her nervous, so she mostly ignored her peers in favor of excelling in her studies instead. She’d worked hard, blazed through a joint accounting and law degree, and then cut a trail through some of the best law firms in Boston as an independent consultant. 

Consultancy paid very well, but it likewise left no time for a social life. She’d spent the years since school living alone in a small, mostly bare apartment. Her scarring made it awkward to start romantic relationships, and most women her age had already established their circles of friends; it was hard to break into those groups, and she still felt-out-of-place even when the people were welcoming. So Aura attended the odd dinner party with colleagues or joined them for a drink after work, and generally spent the rest of her evenings alone in her living room.

That sort of soulless existence was enough to drive anyone to despair, but Aura knew all about despair and she wasn’t going to risk what might result. One day, after the receptionist at her most profitable clients’ office forgot her name for the tenth time, Aura went home and pulled up every newspaper of every small town from Birmingham to Bangor and started looking for a new job. Screw money; she had enough of that. She would go somewhere that she wasn’t just another faceless consultant. Someplace where there were no crowds to get lost in or make her nervous, a place where she could see the same people every day and maybe even have someone notice if she didn’t show up for work. 

It was a week later that she found the Portland Press Herald, and Mr. Gold’s small, discrete advertisement for a position in Storybrooke. A town she’d never heard of – one of those coastal Maine fishing villages, so far opposite the bustle and snobbery of Boston that it would be like moving to another planet, even if it was less than a day’s drive distant. 

It was precisely what she wanted. 

Aura completed work on her latest consulting job, organized her assets, transferred her apartment lease, sold her bland and boring furniture, packed everything else into the back of her Mustang and left Boston with nary a backward glance. She’d trusted her experience and her credentials to pave the way for her, giving no thought to the possibility that they wouldn’t…and here she was, sitting in a chintzy boarding house in Storybrooke, with a pad full of terms that she and Gold had hashed out over coffee in the town diner. 

All in all, she thought things had turned out satisfactorily. And if this mysterious power struggle between her prospective employer and the Mayor became more than an intriguing diversion…well, she could always leave after that first month, couldn’t she? 

* * *

For Aura, it was easy to settle into a routine with Mr. Gold. He rose early to work in the back room of his shop, unlocked the front door at nine, and generally stayed open well into the evening. She mostly kept the same hours, leaving a little earlier and eating dinner at one of the town’s restaurants before returning to the Inn. She often ended up at the diner, which was the liveliest spot in town, and tentatively began to strike up conversations with the townspeople. 

It took her no more than a few days to deduce that Gold was not particularly well-liked …not in the least because he owned most of the town. After hearing over and over that he owned this building or that property or the lease on most of the restaurants, she finally chanced a look at his contracts even though he hadn’t asked her to deal with them yet. 

What she saw corroborated all that she’d heard; he owned the lease on nearly every business in town, and most of the rental properties. And that, she discovered as she worked her way steadily through his accounts, made him the richest man in town. Not filthy rich, not by her standards, at least, but wealthy enough that there was certainly no reason for him to bother with a small-time operation like the pawnshop. 

He was a curiosity. But whenever she tried to get people to tell her more about Gold, they clammed up – especially if she spoke about anything to do with business or property. They were almost as wary of her as Mr. Gold, and it meant that she had a hard time keeping conversations going after the initial forays about the weather. She shrugged it off – accountants weren’t the most popular people anywhere – but underneath her thick skin there was a constant awareness of her status as an outsider, and one who worked for the enemy at that. 

If she stayed in Storybrooke beyond that trial month, hopefully she could do something to change the way people treated her. Feeling isolated in a big city was a matter of course, but she’d grown up in a small town and she knew how painful it could be to never be accepted. 

To an outsider, it probably seemed odd that she’d gone from consulting at high-powered accounting firms to working for a reclusive pawnbroker, but despite what the townspeople might think of Mr. Gold, she found the job suited her. He’d provided her with an office – really a narrow room – all right, a closet – adjoining his workspace, which up until her arrival seemed to have been mainly a repository for books. She cleared it out and gathered up his account books (and they were actual books, in defiance of every technological advance since the middle of the century), and dove in. It was no trouble to make the numbers dance for her; she’d been doing it for years. 

When not squinting at the thick and hand-inked ledgers, she was fascinated by the items in Gold’s shop. He was like a pack rat who’d been given the keys to a museum; there were bits and pieces of every imaginable artifact scattered about the place, in neat displays in the main showroom or cluttering shelves in his workroom. Some of them seemed very out of place indeed – the golden lamp, for example, would have looked right at home in a middle-eastern palace, and she couldn’t imagine why he ever would have acquired those awful puppets he hung in the front of the shop. 

Aura volunteered to help keep the inventory updated just to satisfy her curiosity about Gold’s collection, and he seemed inclined to indulge her. She didn’t think it was possible that her employer, with his steel-trap mind, would need help keeping track of anything in the shop, but she wasn’t about to question his whims if they provided her with entertainment. She loved numbers, but even she had to take a rest from accounting sometimes. 

One afternoon, she was digging through a set of drawers tucked away in a back corner. They contained a right jumble of tools, all of which seemed to have something to do with sewing or spinning or weaving; by-products of an era long gone, she thought as she checked the tag on a pair of iron shears. Some of them she recognized – she collected useless facts about things that interested her the same way Gold collected the items themselves – and she worked her way through a seamstress’ chatelaine, a lap-loom, a set of shuttles that were too big for the loom, one half of a set of wool-carding combs, and a scattering of tarnished silver thimbles. 

When that drawer was finished, she opened the next. This one was more organized and mainly taken up by a tray of what she recognized as spindles, wound with thread. They lay flat in neat rows of a rainbow of colors, surprisingly un-dusty for objects that had presumably been overlooked for some time. Aura pulled the drawer open a bit more and ran her fingers across the wound threads. Here was a deep forest green, almost black; here was an off-white, the color of undyed wool; here was a buttery metallic yellow, almost like…gold? 

She frowned and lifted the spindle to look at it more closely. Metallic thread was a modern invention, and it was usually wrapped and fake-looking, but this was actually a metal wire as supple as real thread – and it was the color of _real_ gold. _Curious,_ she thought, replacing the spindle. 

The next spindle in the line was so dark that she thought it black at first, but when she picked it up by the ends and lifted it out of the drawer, it proved to be a red so deep that it brought to mind the depths of a garnet. The thread shone like silk, and Aura couldn’t resist the urge to run her fingers across it. 

All at once, it felt like the bottom had dropped out of her stomach. Gray fog slammed down in her vision, and she staggered, collapsing against the wall next to the drawers. The spindle dropped from her nerveless fingers into her lap, and she gasped, suddenly unable to get enough air. The sensations were not unfamiliar, but she hadn’t had an episode like this for months and it had _never_ come on so suddenly…

Her ears were ringing, or she would have heard the click of her employer’s cane when he entered the back room. “Miss Grey?” she thought she heard, faintly. But Aura could do little more than struggle to breathe, and responding was impossible… 

The moment stretched on unnaturally. When she finally blinked away the greyness, she found herself slumped against the wall, her legs trapped awkwardly beneath her. It felt like someone’s hands had been touching her cheeks, but the sensation disappeared as her eyes focused. For a moment, she was confused, because Gold was leaning over her from too great a height; he was only a few inches taller than she. Then, she shifted and felt the hard floor of the shop beneath her. Wonderful – she’d gone and fainted. 

“Miss Grey, are you all right?” 

“I – I will be,” she said, her mouth so dry that the words were barely audible. She winced as she tried to shift and the back of her head threatened to come loose; the throbbing made her close her eyes and press her hands to her temples. 

“Don’t move yet. Shall I call an ambulance?” 

She shook her head minutely. “No. It won’t – it’s not necessary.” Aura took a deep breath. “I’ll be all right in a few minutes.” 

Wheels rattled near her ear, and she opened her eyes to find her employer drawing a chair up beside her. Next he would ask why she’d collapsed, and she really didn’t want to talk about that; she had no real reason to be embarrassed about her medical condition, but Aura hated to admit to any kind of weakness. It had been so long since the anemia had given her trouble, she’d almost let herself forget about it. The prescription from her doctor in Boston and dietary supplements had reduced the frequency and severity of episodes like the one she’d just had. But damn it, if they were back she’d have to get treatment again, and she hated letting people know about this particular weakness. 

Her eyes met Gold’s, and she braced herself for the question. He didn’t disappoint her. “Is it an illness?” 

She let out her breath in a sigh; no sense in denying what had happened. “Hemolytic anemia. At least, that’s the closest anyone’s ever come to a diagnosis. I had some trouble with it as a child, but I thought I’d got it under control since...” She cut herself off. She wasn’t going to talk about _that,_ not with anyone. “Apparently I was mistaken.” 

He was watching her closely, though he had his eyelids half-lowered, giving him a casual air. “Is there a connection to your…scars?” When Aura couldn’t keep herself from flinching, he adopted an apologetic tone. “Forgive me. I’d noticed them before now, but if it’s an uncomfortable subject…” 

“It is. But there’s no connection.” She felt steadier, and accepted his offered hand to pull herself up into a more comfortable sitting position. “I don’t like to talk about it.” Because if she talked about it, she would lose herself as she had in the hospital after the accident. The panic and guilt and anger would come back to overwhelm her and she’d be a useless, whimpering shell – and she couldn’t let _anyone_ see her that way. 

“Of course.” 

Despite the nonchalance with which he dismissed it, Aura sensed that he was very interested in her avoidance, and the slightest bit of panic began to burn in her chest. Desperate to change the subject, she looked down at her feet and found that she’d upset the drawer of spindles; several were scattered around her. “I’m sorry about the drawer. I’ll clean it up as soon as I can.” 

“Don’t worry about it, Miss Grey. I can straighten a few drawers.” 

“Thanks.” 

Gold smiled, just a little. “I’ll keep your confidence about this, if that’s what’s worrying you,” he said, confirming her suspicions that he’d read the panic in her expression. “Rumors travel quickly in a small town like Storybrooke, and it can be difficult to keep things private.” 

Aura leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes briefly. “Thank you,” she said again, more emphatically. “It’s not something everyone needs to know about.” 

“At any rate, I am hardly regarded as an arbiter of gossip.”

 _That_ she would believe without question. He was not a popular man; the real riddle was why. He owned most of the town, but that alone wasn’t necessarily enough to make him unloved. There must be something to his reputation that she wasn’t seeing. “I wouldn’t have expected it,” she replied, opening her eyes again. “But it surprises me how far people go out of their way to avoid you.” 

He made a little moue of dismissal. “No one ever loves a landlord.” 

Her heart had started beating faster, and she felt like she was slipping onto dangerous ground by pushing the subject – but push she would. She didn’t like being ignorant of any situation she was in the thick of. “The Mayor hates you,” she said. “I don’t think she’s very fond of me, either.”

“She’s a very…ambitious woman. She dislikes challenges to her authority.” 

“Yes, I’ve noticed how she lords over people here.” Aura took a deep breath, and then plunged on. “They’re afraid of her…but I think they’re more afraid of you.” 

Gold’s eyes were suddenly open much wider, and focused intensely on her. “That’s an astute observation, dear. Are _you_ afraid of me?”

Aura was proud that she kept her outward demeanor calm. “Should I be?” she challenged.

He laughed a little at that. “You’re either very brave or very foolish, Miss Grey, and I wouldn’t have hired you if it was the latter.” 

Aura let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. “I’ve never been accused of bravery before.” She managed a small smile that held far more confidence than she felt. For a moment, Gold _had_ frightened her. Something about his manner, his presence, had spoken to instincts that she’d rarely used since she’d been able to afford to move out of the cheaper parts of Boston. _Predator,_ they’d said. 

“Brave enough, to take the risk of coming here for the job. And with the town ogre.” 

The joke eased her nervousness somewhat, as did the laugh lines that appeared around his eyes. “Oh, surely not an ogre. I’ve yet to see you devour a single baby,” she jested in return. 

“Appearances can be deceiving.” 

“Well, you’re very circumspect about it.” The dizziness and throbbing in her head had finally begun to pass, and she gathered her feet underneath her and started to rise, slowly. “Is it too early for tea? I think it might help.” 

He pushed his chair back, braced himself on his cane and offered a hand to aid her once more. “Take whatever time you need, my dear. I’ll prepare the tea today.” They’d begun taking afternoon tea together in her second week, after she’d asked to borrow his tea things for the seventh day running. She’d never been in the habit of drinking coffee, not even in college, but a cup of black tea in the afternoon helped her keep up with Gold’s habitually late hours.

Her employer installed her at his desk on the chair he’d been using, and she relaxed gratefully while he went about the homely motions of brewing tea, just as he had at her interview. “You’ll want to be careful around Regina,” he said over his shoulder as he waited for the water to boil. “She doesn’t go out of her way to disturb me, but she likes to sharpen her claws on anyone she doesn’t think she can control.”

Aura snorted softly. “That doesn’t surprise me,” she said. “But I appreciate the warning. I hadn’t intended to get in a dispute with anyone when I moved here, but I won’t be bullied.” She smiled. “No matter how unpopular my employer is.”

Gold’s grin was wolfish. “I hope you’re ready for a fight.”

“If it comes to that, I will be.” Aura looked down at the table, her eyes flicking over the various half-finished restoration projects that littered it. There was a time when she might have backed down from a challenge like the Mayor; in the past, she hadn’t been particularly aggressive or vicious, despite her stubborn streak.

But the accident had taught her how easy it was to lose what she had, whether it was fate or a person doing the taking. It had hardened her and left behind a shred of ruthlessness of her own, and no one, certainly not some small-town mayor with delusions of grandeur, was going to threaten what was hers.

“I’ll be ready,” she repeated to herself, not noticing the look of satisfaction that crossed Gold’s face.


	8. Of Two Minds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aura remembers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rating has gone up for language and pretty graphic imagery. Bit of a long one!

No matter what she did, Aura couldn’t seem to steer clear of Mayor Mills. When she renewed a prescription using the town’s pharmacy, the woman was in line behind her, making a snide comment about hoping Aura wouldn’t be around long enough to need another – and then trying to peer at the label on the medication. When Aura inquired into the procedures for setting up a bank account and transferring funds from her old bank, the teller suddenly discovered a rule requiring at least six months of permanent residency. When Aura went to the police station to ask about registering her car, she was presented with a list of required documents as long as her arm. 

Aura kept her suspicions to herself since she didn’t have any hard proof the Mayor was trying to run her off, but the warning shots kept coming. Frivolous traffic citations, mail getting lost at the post office, even phone calls from former employers who were confused that someone was requesting character references for jobs Aura had never applied for.

She wasn’t one to back down from a challenge, but Aura needed ammunition before she could strike any kind of useful blow at the infuriating woman. Unfortunately, since the townspeople seemed to fear Regina Mills almost as much as Mr. Gold, ammunition was not forthcoming. Aura didn’t have close friends yet, so no one would confide in her. It left her with only one real ally, and she wasn’t quite sure how to go about asking Gold for help. Or if she wanted to.

One day when her trial month was almost up, matters came to a head. Work at the shop had been slow that afternoon and Aura had gone to Granny’s diner for a snack. It was between the lunch and dinner services, so there weren’t many people around, but she noticed when a small boy in a school uniform sat down at the bar two stools away and asked for a cocoa. She smiled at him briefly, then turned her attention back to her slice of pie, not wanting to bother a child lest someone treat her with even more suspicion. She got enough of that from the townspeople already. 

“Hey, are you the lady who works at Mr. Gold’s shop?” 

Aura looked up, startled, and found that the boy had moved a seat closer and was looking at her expectantly. “Yes, I’m Mr. Gold’s accountant.” 

The boy stuck out a hand. “I’m Henry. What’s your name?” 

Tentatively, she clasped it with her own. “Aurelia Grey. But you can call me Aura if you like.”

Henry smiled. “That’s a neat name. And you’ve got a cool accent, almost like Mr. Gold’s. Are you related?" 

“No,” Aura said with a bit of a laugh. “No, it’s almost the same accent, but we’re not related. I just work for him.” She took a bite of her pie, then motioned to his overstuffed backpack with the fork. “Looks like you’ve got a ton of homework there.” 

Henry looked down at the bag. “Oh, that. Not really. Most of them are books my teacher gave me to read. We’re talking about Greek mythology in class this week and I wanted to see the stories.”

“Those are good ones. I always liked the story of Pandora and her box, or the ones about Hippolyta and the Amazon warrior women.”

“Yeah, we read Pandora but we haven’t gotten to Theseus yet.” Ruby, Granny’s granddaughter and the head waitress at the diner, put a mug and a canister of cinnamon down on the counter in front of Henry and winked at him. Henry proceeded to douse his foamy hot chocolate with cinnamon and then take a huge slurp, which left him with a speckly moustache. 

Aura couldn’t help but smile at him. He was really cute, and smart as well, if he remembered that Hippolyta was part of the legend of Theseus. “You like cinnamon with your cocoa, huh?” 

“It’s the best way to have it!” 

“I bet. I like a little bit of chili powder, myself.” 

That got her the expected reaction; Henry screwed up his face and asked, “Really? That sounds weird.”

She finished the last bite of her pie. “It’s an acquired taste. But it gives the chocolate a little kick. It’s better when it’s really cold out, though. I grew up in New Hampshire, and we used to have winters where it would do nothing but snow, and my…I always loved chili chocolate.” She caught herself just before she could say “my mother used to make it for me”. She wasn’t ready to bring that up with a stranger, even one as endearing as Henry. 

Henry took another sip of his chocolate, looking contemplative. “Maybe my mom will let me try it. I think she’s got chili powder in her spices.” 

“Only if it’s a mild one. You don’t want to burn your tastebuds off.” Aura pulled out the cash for her pie and a tip, and slid off the stool. “Well, it was nice to meet you, Henry, but I’ve got to get back to the shop. Mr. Gold doesn’t really go for long breaks.” 

The boy glanced out the window, where the corner of the pawnshop was just visible down the street. “Is he as scary as he seems?” 

Aura hesitated, wanting to answer honestly. “Sometimes dealing with money can make people frightened and angry, and I think he doesn’t do much to help them feel better. But Mr. Gold is fair. Tough, but fair.” She shrugged. “He’s always been polite to me.” She couldn’t say he’d been nice, because he really hadn’t, but polite seemed like a good compromise. 

Ruby leaned over the counter to pick up Aura’s money. “Hey, Henry, you’d better keep an eye on the clock. You don’t want your mom to get mad at you for being late again.” 

Henry glanced up at the clock over the door, which read three minutes to 5. “She’s in a council meeting. She’s gonna pick me up from here in a couple minutes.”

Aura raised one eyebrow, a trick she was secretly proud of. “Council meeting?” 

He looked, to her surprise, faintly embarrassed. “Yeah. My mom’s the Mayor.” 

For a second, Aura couldn’t think of anything to say. Henry was Regina’s _son?_ How had that venomous woman produced a boy as sweet and precocious as Henry? She found it hard to believe, but as she stood gaping rudely, proof presented itself: there was Regina, pulling up in front of the diner in her Mercedes. She clacked in through the door and as soon as she saw Aura, a sour expression spread across her face. Regina hid it quickly, but not before Henry caught it; Aura could see him biting his lip nervously. “Good afternoon, Miss Grey,” Regina said with a tone of false geniality. “I see you’ve met my son.”

Aura matched her geniality with a falsely cheerful smile. “Yes, he was telling me that he’s studying Greek mythology in school.”

Regina’s eyes flashed a warning. “His teacher is fond of fairy tales, I’ve noticed.” 

Aura shrugged. “Nothing wrong with a bit of fantasy every once in a while.” 

The Mayor’s expression hardened just a bit, which surprised Aura. What did she have against fairy tales? Not practical enough for the real world? “Yes, well. I’m sure you have duties to attend to elsewhere, Miss Grey,” Regina said, laying a hand on Henry’s shoulder. “Back at the pawnshop.”

That was a dismissal if she’d ever heard one. Aura glanced at Ruby, who usually had attitude enough to spare for rude customers, but she found no support there; the waitress wore a wary expression and wouldn’t meet her eye. Aura pursed her lips in displeasure, but she couldn’t force her company on someone else’s child. This round would have to go to Regina. “Thanks for the conversation, Henry,” she said politely. “Enjoy your cocoa.” 

She could feel Regina’s gaze burning into her back as she left the diner. Aura dropped the pretense of civility as soon as she was out of sight of the windows, muttering deprecations under her breath as she stomped back down the street to the pawnshop. She let herself in the back door, not wanting to take her ire out on her employer, but he must have heard her banging about her ‘office’ and peered in several minutes later. “Is everything all right, Miss Grey?” 

Aura’s hands tightened on the book she held, but she set it down gently enough on the battered old desk she used. “Just another encounter with Madam Mayor. I swear, if her attitude gets any more venomous I’m going to need shots.” 

Gold stayed in the door, since there was barely room in the office for Aura. “You found yourself on the wrong side of her anger again.” 

She sighed, letting go of some of her tension. “I had a conversation about hot chocolate with her son.” 

“Ah, young Henry. Yes, he’s quite the despair of his mother when it comes to being friendly with the local…peasantry.” Gold’s mouth quirked, and Aura couldn’t help but smile herself at the quip. Mayor Mills _did_ treat the rest of the town like she was a queen and they were all beneath her. 

“Yeah, well, I doubt she’ll let him get within a few dozen yards of me again. I just can’t figure out why she hates me so much when I haven’t _done_ anything. Aside from hiring on with you.” 

“That’s damning enough in her eyes,” Gold replied. “Regina and I…have a long history. She’s been forced to call on me in the past, and she resents being beholden to anyone.” 

“And obviously being affiliated with you has made me a corrupting influence.” Aura said, shaking her head. “I just wish I could get her to stop trying to strangle me with red tape. Verbal attacks I can handle, but this business with the bank and my car…I know she’s behind it all, but I can’t catch her in the act.” She shifted a couple of accounting ledgers to a less precarious position and sat down in her chair. “Think that’ll ever happen?”

“I wouldn’t hold my breath, dearie. Regina may be vindictive, but she’s also quite good at covering her tracks. You’d have to result to less-than legal means to find them.” 

Aura looked up at her employer warily. “And you’d know what those are?” 

“Perhaps. But I don’t think you’re quite ready for them yet.” Her employer gave her one of his not-quite smiles and left her staring after him, unsure of how to react to _that_ particular declaration. She’d got the feeling that not all of his business dealings were above-board, but he hadn’t confirmed it until now. It didn’t help her feel any better about the situation. 

_Should_ she stay in Storybrooke? Her month was almost up and the contract didn’t tie her here any longer than that. And it was quite clear that Mayor Mills was willing to pull some pretty nasty tricks to discourage her from staying. Did she really want to put up with that? Aura frowned at her desk again. Regina Mills had no right to run her off, and she was tempted to stick around just to spite the woman. If it came to a legal battle, she had the skills to fight and win, and Mr. Gold had intimated that he might help her. And if there was anyone in the town who might keep the Mayor in check, it was him. 

Still…something warned her against growing too beholden to her employer. She couldn’t say what it was, only that it had to be some sort of instinct; she’d felt it before when dealing with a group of corporate accountants who’d later turned out to have been cooking the books and diverting funds to offshore accounts. A feeling in her gut that stepping forward would embroil her in more trouble than she wanted. Aura was stubborn, but not stupid, and she had been hoping to lead a quiet life here.

Perhaps matters would settle down soon. She had that long to think about the contract; as long as she stepped carefully around the Mayor, she might be able to do it in peace.

* * *

 

When Aura walked back to the boarding house that evening, Granny greeted her with her mail as usual. “Glad to see some of it got delivered this time,” Aura joked, though not without bitterness at the whole situation. She flipped through it as she started up the stairs: little more than a cell phone bill and a few bank statements, which she ignored, since she knew exactly what the state of her accounts was. But there was one more envelope today, stamped with what she recognized as the Storybrooke seal and bearing the return address of the police station.

“What in the world?” Aura said to herself, pausing on the landing. She slid a finger under the seal and hooked out a sheaf of pages. When she scanned the top one, she swore so loudly that it brought Granny running out from behind the front desk.

“That slimy, conniving _hag!_ ” Aura exclaimed, ignoring the innkeeper’s look of shock. The paper she held was a legal notice, declaring her a trespasser on town property due to a failure to obtain a specialized local accounting license. The letter was dated to that day, and declared that she was to leave the town limits immediately or face arrest. 

“What’s wrong?” the older woman asked, but Aura was so angry she couldn’t find the words to answer. As she stood there, fuming with the injustice, there was a knock at the front door. Granny opened it to admit a tall curly-haired man in a leather jacket that bore a police badge. “Miss Grey?” he called up the stairs. “It’s Sheriff Humbert. I’ve been asked to provide you with an escort out of Storybrooke.”

He sounded miserable about it, like a kicked puppy, but Aura had no sympathy at the moment; he’d obviously been waiting for her to come back to the inn, if he’d shown up mere moments after she’d seen the letter. “I’m not going anywhere until someone explains these ridiculous charges,” she snapped, stamping down the stairs. “Did Mayor Mills put you up to this?” 

The Sheriff grimaced, but stood his ground. “It was an anonymous request, but the bylaw is part of the town charter and I am obligated to enforce it. I can give you time to pack your things, then I’ve been asked to follow your car to the town limits once you leave.”

Aura glared up at him. “And if I choose not to leave?” 

“Then I…” He hesitated and coughed to hide it. “I’ll have to take you into custody.” 

_“Arrest me?_ For not having some stupid license I couldn’t have known existed?” 

She could have been sticking pins in the Sheriff and he would have looked more comfortable than he did at the moment. “Look, Miss Grey, I’m terribly sorry, but I can’t do anything about this at the moment,” he said quietly, as though trying to soothe her. “If you just leave for the night, maybe you can call someone in town to clear this up tomorrow.” 

The next town was thirty miles away, and she was fairly certain it didn’t have a hotel – and that was even if she had considered retreat an option. Which she didn’t. Aura crumpled the letter in her fist and let out a long breath through her nose as she tried to restrain herself from striking the Sheriff. It certainly wouldn’t help in the long run…but she knew what might. “I need to make a call now,” she said, her voice tight with repressed fury. 

The Sheriff opened his mouth to say something, then thought better of it. “I’ll wait here.” He glanced at Granny, who had been observing the whole thing without comment, but the woman just pointed him to a chair, clearly not intending to get involved. Aura couldn’t blame her – who was foolish enough to want to go up against Mayor Mills, aside from her? 

She pursed her lips, gave a curt nod and then pounded back up the stairs, pulling her cell from her pocket as she did. She’d left Gold at the shop and doubtless he’d still be there, so that was the number she called up. She fumbled her key into the door and entered her room as the phone rang on the other end.

_“Yes, Miss Grey?”_

Either she was the only one who had his number, or he’d been expecting her call, she thought vaguely when she heard him. If she had been thinking clearly she might have found that odd, but anger was clouding her instincts too badly. “It seems, Mr. Gold, that I’m to be escorted out of town on charges of failing to obtain a special license for my accountancy.” Her tone was civil but steely; she was angry with the Mayor, but also irritated with him, since it ought to have been his responsibility to inform her of the law. “Mayor Mills has finally found a legal loophole to choke me with. I’ll have to leave tonight.” 

There was silence on the other end of the phone for a moment. _“Has she served you with documents to that effect?”_  

“Yes. One of the few things that made it into my mailbox this week.” 

_“Don’t leave yet, my dear. I have some small legal knowledge pertaining to our town’s bylaws, and I very much doubt Regina’s offense will stand in court.”_  

Aura scowled as she pulled a suitcase out from under the bed. “I don’t fancy waiting around for a court date. And if you plan on doing something tonight, I hope the Sheriff is more frightened of you than Regina, because he’s waiting downstairs to arrest me if I don’t leave.” 

_“I’ll see what I can do, Miss Grey. I’ll arrive shortly.”_

He hung up without waiting for a reply, and Aura used another few choice words as she pitched the phone onto the bed and started pulling clothing out of the closet. It was a good thing she didn’t have much to go into her car, because Regina was no doubt going to show up before long to hurry her on her way.

She’d left the door open, and she was so mad that she didn’t hear anyone come up the stairs. Only the sound of someone delicately clearing his throat made her turn, and when she did she found Gold darkening her doorway, one hand on his cane. “Oh. It’s you,” she said rudely, and went back to pitching her belongings into bags.

“I’m sorry it’s come to this, Miss Grey,” Gold said, stepping into the room without waiting for an invitation. “Regina may not be the pinnacle of mayoral behavior, but she is persistent. Had I known that she had taken to harassing you…”

“I’m used to dealing with my own problems,” Aura snapped. “I’ve got a fucking double degree and half of it’s in law practice, for pity’s sake.” 

“Humor a man who’s about to lose his accountant. I also have some experience in legal matters, and if you’ll let me help you, we might be able to turn this situation to our advantage.”

She laughed bitterly. "Yeah? With your ‘less-than-legal-means’? Because that’s the only way I can see myself getting out of this right now. She's got her pet sheriff waiting outside to arrest me if I don’t leave. Dammit, I wasn’t planning on having jail time on my record." She smashed another pair of shoes into the bag and savagely yanked the zipper closed.

"There are ways to work around her authority," he replied. "Regina isn't as powerful as she thinks."

Aura looked up in irritation. "What's going on between you two? I don’t believe for a minute that she’s coming after an _accountant_ and especially not because I ‘forgot’ to get some stupid license _._ This stinks of an old grudge, and I am _not_ happy to be caught in the middle of it.” 

Mr. Gold watched her from beneath lowered eyelids. “I can tell you the truth, Miss Grey, but I’m not sure you’ll want to hear it. It’s considerably more complicated than you expect. And it does involve you – somewhat intimately, in fact.” 

She stopped packing and glared at him, not liking how the conversation was going. "What the hell do you mean by that?" 

“I can’t tell you that without making you privy to the whole story. Do you want to be?” 

What the hell was this, some sort of secret plot? “I guess that would depend on whether I trust you,” Aura snarled, turning away and hurling a stack of clothes into her suitcase. 

"And do you trust me?" 

Aura jumped and spun around, only to find Mr. Gold had moved so close that her hair brushed his coat. He'd maneuvered so she was trapped between the bed and the nightstand and she stared into his eyes, her own wide with shock at his nearness. Her heart beat rapidly; he had never approached her like this, _never_ , and she wasn’t sure how to react. Was he going to attack her? Did she need to defend herself? 

"I...don't know," she gasped, wobbling. He’d discarded his cane somewhere, so he didn’t have that to hand, but he was intimidating enough all on his own – even with a bad leg, he had a few inches and a bit of mass to his advantage. 

He smiled and took her arm in one hand. Leaning close to her ear, he murmured, "That's my girl." He leaned back, reached into his pocket and pulled something out, then held it up between them. “You’ll be wanting this back,” he said, and she stared as the lamplight glinted on garnet-red thread, wound thickly around a spindle. The spindle from the shop. 

Everything was falling apart, and she was so confused that she hardly knew what to say next. “What does that have to do with it?” She tried to pull her arm back, but he was stronger than she’d expected, and he kept his grip. 

“Everything.” Moving so swiftly that she had no time to react, he dragged his grip down to her fingertips, raised her hand, and drove the point of the spindle through her palm. 

At first she didn’t feel anything but the impact, and she started stupidly at the spindle where it protruded from her hand. “You crazy bastard!” she cried, crashing back into the nightstand as the wound started to leak blood. 

The pain hit her then…but at the same time, there was a flash of purple light, and the thread on the spindle began to glow. Then it began to _move_ , breaking into dozens of strands that swirled up her arm like snakes. She had a moment to gasp before they sank into her skin like tree roots, and then the pain got worse, and it wasn’t just in her hand but _all over_ , a fire that spread through her very veins. 

Aura slid off the nightstand and landed hard on the floor, her breath sobbing as she doubled over and clutched her hand to her chest. It wasn’t possible, she thought frantically as she fought the burning. But the threads were _in_ her, insinuating, winding through every corner of her… Her vision blurred and flickered, and she watched in a daze as strange images superimposed themselves on reality. An elegant room...a spinning wheel...a cave flickering with torchlight...the flash of light on a knifeblade...and then the memory of another kind of pain, not fiery but cold and inexorable. 

Gold leaned over her. When she looked up at him, his face seemed overlaid by a fearsome visage, glittering grey and green and set with a wickedly grinning mouth and strange mossy eyes. "I told you that you would return to me one day, Aura," he said in an entirely different tone of voice from his usual deep burr. The new face faded as she watched, but the wicked smile remained.

He straightened, and she stared up at him, aghast. “What have you done to me?” she demanded breathlessly. The burning had subsided, and the spindle and its contents had vanished, leaving nothing but small punctures that were already, impossibly, scarred over. Her mind, though, her mind felt as if it would spill over. Strange memories swirled through her, memories that she couldn’t possibly have. Memories of another life entirely. 

“I’ve given you your life back,” Gold said, an expression of amusement sweeping over his face – incongruous for the reserved businessman, but not for who he had once been.  “Did you never wonder why you came to Storybrooke, of all places? We made a deal, Aura. Your ten years are finished, and it’s time to fulfill _your_ end of the bargain.” 

And gods above, she knew he was telling the truth – just as she knew why her employer had another face, and why something about him had always seemed vaguely familiar to her. She remembered _everything_ , the sum of _two_ lives, one mundane and one so fantastic that it should be a fairy tale itself. 

“Rumpelstiltskin,” she breathed. 

He made an elaborate bow, and it was totally out of place in this world, but oh, was it familiar. “Welcome back, dearie.” 

Aura shut her eyes, as if she could force everything back to the way it had been. “No,” she whispered, trying to negate the reality that was crashing down on her. “No, no, no, _no,_ this can’t be _…”_  

But when she opened them again, Gold – Rumpelstiltskin, whatever clothing he was wearing or what he had done to his eyes – was still there, waiting. Despair and anger warred within her. She remembered those last few weeks in the other world, the way the Queen had tried to drive her mad and set a Wild Hunt to kill her. A chill crept down her spine. “She remembers who I am, doesn’t she? Regina? That’s why she’s trying to run me off.” 

“Oh, yes. An unfortunate condition of the curse. It would be much more convenient if she didn’t remember, but…” He shrugged. 

“Pox and murrain,” Aura muttered. Then she clapped a hand to her mouth when she realized what she’d just said, and her stomach lurched. “Oh, fuck,” she added for good measure, then fumbled her way to her feet and stumbled past Gold, heading for the bathroom. She dropped to her knees by the toilet and swallowed leaned over it, swallowing convulsively; she _hated_ throwing up. 

By the time she got her stomach under control she was taking deep, shaky breaths and sweat had gathered on her face. When she felt steady enough to stand, she turned on the light and the faucet, then plunged her hands into the water and brought handfuls up to splash her face and rinse her mouth. What a mess, what a ridiculous _impossible fucking mess_. 

Aura heard him this time when he walked up behind her. “Feeling better?” Rumpelstiltskin said from the doorway. 

“No.” She grabbed one of the towels from the bar and scrubbed it against her face. “Who else knows about the curse?” 

“You and I and Regina, that I am aware of.” His enigmatic shopkeeper face was back, but she couldn’t forget the one that really belonged there instead. “It’s possible there are others. If I had not worked you into the curse itself, your immunity would have protected you.” 

Yes, she remembered that too – small spells often passed her by, and even Rumpelstiltskin had had to exert himself to cast more powerful ones on her. It was one of her only non-mundane abilities, something he’d wanted to incorporate into the curse. And, she thought bitterly, probably the main reason he’d kept her in the first place. 

Aura pushed by Gold into the room and picked up another piece of clothing, but instead of stuffing it into a bag she just clung to it. Gods, this was too much, too much to deal with all at once. She could feel shock setting in and welcomed it, wrapping herself in a cloud of denial as she sat down on the bed, dropped the sweater in her lap and put her head in her hands. Gold followed her, and the tips of his impeccably polished shoes came into her view of the floor. 

“How long?” she asked dully. “How long has it been?” There was no telling how time had passed between the worlds; if he’d kept his word, she had arrived here ten years earlier, but there was no reason why he must have done the same. 

“Ten years for you, but twenty-eight for those of us in the town. The town itself was under a kind of stasis and you were held frozen between the two worlds for the first eighteen years of the curse. Ten years ago, the curse released you at the edge of town.” 

“I’ve never been here before.” Ten years ago had been the accident; but that had been in New Hampshire. Coming home from a party. Not here, not in Maine. 

Gold reached into his coat and pulled out a faded, yellowed newspaper clipping. “Yes, dearie, you have.” 

Aura’s fingers trembled as she reached out to take the bit of paper. There was a smeary photo of a nighttime scene, garishly lit by white and red ambulance lights, and what might have been a helicopter in back of the crowd of emergency vehicles. For a moment the headline of the article refused to resolve itself into words as a flashback descended on her: broken glass, blood black and glittering on the ground, a smashed guardrail on a small bridge. But this time, she saw the car from _outside_ , saw headlights bearing down on her and felt the ghost of an impact smash through her middle. The rush of air around her, the hardness of pavement below. Tearing, ripping, slicing. 

With a cry, Aura pulled herself from the vision and her bedroom at the inn restored itself. One of her hands was clutched to her middle as if she was holding together a wound, but the one with the newspaper rested numbly on her lap. _Icy disaster on Storybrooke Toll Bridge,_ read the headline, and below it, _Teenage girl airlifted to Dover Trauma Center._

Her fingers pinched convulsively on the thin scrap of paper, and she made a terrible, choked sound deep in her throat. “No,” she rasped again, horrified. She had _caused_ the accident. She had made the car swerve off the bridge – Storybrooke’s bridge, the toll bridge on the very edge of town. The one with a small but swift and deep creek below. “Oh, gods, no.”

Gold went on, quietly but unrelenting. “Robert and Linda Grey’s daughter was the only survivor of the accident,” he said, pointing one long finger at the tiny portrait below the main photograph. Aura found her eyes inexorably drawn to it, and a wave of dread washed over her. The girl in the photo was small, with black, curly hair and brown eyes, almost a match…but it was not her. _It was not her._  

“I’m not their daughter,” Aura whispered. “But…how…her body…” 

“The curse would have hidden it. The woods around Storybrooke are extensive.” 

His matter-of-fact tone chilled her to her core. If that was true…then the curse had caused that car crash, killed a family, all so that _she_ could have her ten years of freedom. Slotted her into their lives somehow, replacing their daughter with a changeling, a doppelganger, a cuckoo’s child. She was not Aurelia Grey – she had no right to the name. People had _died_ for her. 

Would they have even come to Storybrooke if not for her selfishness? Had the curse drawn them here, or simply taken advantage of the situation? Revulsion filled her. She’d only wanted to be safe. She’d never meant to kill anyone. “Oh, gods,” she said again, burying her face in her hands as if she could shut it all out. “They’re dead because of me. If I hadn’t been there they wouldn’t have died. It’s still my fault…”

“Aura.” She looked up reflexively. That tone of command was much older than her grief, and she’d long ago learned to obey it, no matter what. “Aura,” Gold repeated, “We can speak of this later. You don’t want to let Regina have the satisfaction of seeing you this way, do you?”

The remark stung her pride, as he’d intended it to, but faintly; she could barely feel it through the thick, numbing cocoon of shock that was beginning to settle around her. It took her a moment to reply. “No,” she said, feeling like she was swimming through clouds as she sat up straight. “But she’s still going to arrest me.” _And she should,_ Aura added to herself as she stared down at her hands. _I’m a murderer. I have blood on my conscience._ “I won’t be much help sitting in a jail cell.” 

“Let her do it. She has no real grounds to hold you, and I’ll post your bail tomorrow.” He reached down and lifted her chin with his free hand, until she was looking into those deceptively mild brown eyes again. “Our dear mayor suffers from overconfidence, and I’ve been playing this game far longer than she. I’ve engineered her downfall into the curse, and she won’t see it until it’s too late. Now that you’re here, we just have to set events in motion.” 

Her deal. Of course. Ten years of freedom, and then she had to render whatever aid he wanted until Regina’s defeat. Tied to Rumpelstiltskin once more, and only free if she managed to survive a campaign against the Evil Queen. “I’ll still need a place to live,” Aura murmured. “No one in town will take me in after this. They already distrust me.” 

“Oh, I expect Regina will scare them into trying to run you off. She doesn’t do things by half-measures.” Gold picked up the sweater she’d dropped on the bed, folded it carefully, and set it in the last open bag. “But she won’t threaten me. She’s too frightened of what I might do even without my memories.” 

“What do you mean?” 

“I mean that you should come live with me. It’s not as if I’m lacking for space.” 

Live with him in that massive old Victorian monstrosity? It would be just like living together in the Dark Castle, and that was what she had so wanted to escape, what she’d agreed to this whole horrible mess for. Aura’s fists clenched and then released, and her shoulders slumped, as she realized that he’d once again maneuvered her into doing precisely what he wanted. “I don’t have a choice, do I?” 

“Oh, everybody has a choice, Aura. But you made yours a long time ago.” 

Yes, and look what her choice had wrought: an innocent family dead, their property in the hands of someone who didn’t deserve it, and her own life falling to pieces around her. Her retort choked in her throat, and she stood and fumbled with the zipper on her last open bag. 

“Leave your things here. I’ll see that they’re delivered home.” 

“To _your_ home,” Aura muttered. 

“As it so happens, there is a separate apartment on the third floor of my house. It would be perfectly proper for you to rent it from me if you were planning on staying in town.” 

“People will talk anyway.” She’d heard the whispers about the two of them. Mr. Gold _never_ hired help unless it was muscle, and therefore there must be some salacious reason for her presence. 

Gold didn’t smile this time, but it was there in his voice. “Do you care?” 

Did she? In the face of everything that she’d just realized, what did her reputation really matter? It was wrong to give it the same gravity as murder, to worry about smutty rumors when she had caused the death of innocents. Aura finally lifted her shoulders in a weak shrug. “Not really, no.”

Still caught up in a haze of shock and disbelief, she looked around the room, checking to see that she’d got everything packed, and then took her blazer from the hook on the back of the door and pulled it on. “The key’s on the dresser,” she said vaguely. She left Rumpelstiltskin standing in the midst of her scattered belongings, feeling like she was walking to the gallows as she descended the stairs to where the Sheriff was waiting.

* * *

Sheriff Humbert – he’d mentioned his first name at some point, but she wasn’t paying attention – was almost too kind to her. He seemed terribly embarrassed at what he had to do, but it was clear who had him by the short hairs; within an hour, he had booked her, taken photos and fingerprints and ushered her into a bare cell with a lovely view of the police station’s office space. It had a narrow cot with an institutional grey blanket and one high barred window, and nothing more. Before he left for his own home the Sheriff escorted her to the bathroom and offered an extra blanket, but she refused and he soon departed, dimming the lights as he went.

There was little for her to do in the darkness besides sleep, and Aura was far beyond any ability to do that.

Just remembering that she had led another life all those years she thought she’d had a family, and in another _world_ , was enough to rattle her to the core. It would be enough to upset anyone, really. And it had been with Rumpelstiltskin – Rumpelstiltskin! A name she thought she’d known only from storybooks, a construct of some foreign mind in a country long gone, and now it turned out that not only was he a living being but he had _raised_ her.

Apparently she hadn’t learned much from the experience. She’d grown up with Rumpelstiltskin, and she should have known better than to make that bargain with him; to sign that contract without being fully aware of its consequences was the height of stupidity, no matter how desperate she’d been. But here she was, bound by honor and magic to a deal she now knew she barely understood.

And that stupidity had led to a nightmare. The curse had kept her in limbo for ten years, and then delivered her to the world in the cruelest way possible. But…had the magic murdered of its own initiative, carrying out Rumpelstiltskin’s orders in the most efficient way possible and placing her in the path of that truck? Or had he taken an active part in bringing her here? Her blood had made it possible; he had remembered his purpose for all of the thirty years Storybrooke had been held in stasis, and he could have been waiting for just the right moment to bring her back. 

She shied away from the thought. Rumpelstiltskin was cruel, and she knew he had killed before. He’d made no pretense of denying the fact, when she’d encountered those of his supplicants who knew the tales of the Spinner’s caprice. But she’d always convinced herself that it had been for defendable reasons: for protection, or to get rid of brigands and murderers, or as a punishment for a badly broken deal. She’d been steeped in such an odd morality, growing up with him, that it didn’t seem wrong to her when he’d done things like that. But ten years in this world had irrevocably changed her moral base. He might think nothing of killing to further his aims, but she couldn’t think that way. Even in the old world, the only person she’d ever wanted dead was Regina, and that in revenge for torture.

For the man and woman her memory named mother and father, and their true daughter, her mental agony mattered little. They were just as dead either way, and the guilt was still hers to keep. But it mattered to her if Rumpelstiltskin had killed those people on purpose. If he had deliberately made that choice, then everything she had believed in was rotten and corrupted.

She wept alone in the dark, shedding tears for the people who should have had a different future with a daughter they loved – a daughter who nearly had her face. Who should have grown up and grown old with her family. Now that future was gone, and she was left clutching at the tattered remains of a past that had never belonged to her in the first place.

Even when the tears were spent, the guilt remained, and Aura didn’t sleep at all that night. 

To his credit, the Sheriff showed up the next morning with a bag of bagels and cream cheese and cups of strong coffee. She hadn’t eaten since the pie at the diner, and low blood sugar had combined with the clinging guilt to make her a bundle of misery and a sharp tongue. Two bagels and a great deal of coffee later, she began to feel much more human, and she even found it in her to thank the Sheriff for his consideration. It wasn’t his fault he’d had to lock her up, though she could wish he would find a bit more spine to resist Regina’s machinations.

After breakfast, there wasn’t much left to do but to watch Humbert go about his job, which mostly seemed to consist of paperwork. She hadn’t seen any other police officers in town, which should have been odd but could be chalked up to her new knowledge of Storybrooke as Regina’s personal dollhouse. Strange that no one else had ever thought to question it, though. There were a lot of things no one seemed to question here, not the least of which was why no one had noticed that no one had aged for twenty-eight years. Gold looked exactly as Rumpelstiltskin had when she’d left him, though without his glittering skin and strange eyes, and Regina was as icily beautiful as ever. 

As Aura was contemplating the mechanics of how one might keep an entire town in stasis for three decades without anyone outside it noticing, the Sheriff left the office. To her surprise he came back with a visitor, and of course it turned out to be the person she least wanted to see. 

Mayor Mills clacked in on her expensive heels, wafting a cloud of perfume over Aura and generally making her feel disheveled and plebeian in the wrinkled clothing she’d been wearing since the night before. The woman’s face was set in a blandly sympathetic expression that was doing a poor job of hiding the smugness she no doubt felt at having Aura at her mercy.

Aura’s lip curled in a snarl. Better to look angry than broken; acting the part would help her feel the bravado and defiance that she needed to face the Mayor, no matter how her stomach twisted and churned on the revelations of the night before. “Come to gloat?” she demanded poisonously. 

“Not at all, Miss Grey.” Regina waved at the Sheriff, dismissing him to his office with an imperious gesture. “Merely to issue a warning.” 

Aura stood up and walked up to the bars, folding her arms and widening her stance just a little. She knew how to play body language games, perhaps better than Regina. A childhood spent with a master trickster would do that. “You might have done that _before_ having me arrested.” 

The Mayor smiled. “Oh, I think I gave you plenty of chances to avoid it. You chose not to listen, hence the consequences.” She tapped the bars with the tip of one manicured finger.

Aura would have liked nothing better than to grab that hand and snap some fingers, but while it would satisfy her anger it wouldn’t help in the long run. “What kind of backwater town has laws that forbid _unlicensed accounting?_ ” she retorted.

“One where the laws are…slow to change.” Regina began pacing slowly past the bars, still smiling her deadly smile. “Let’s speak plainly, Miss Grey. I am not pleased by your presence in Storybrooke, and least of all by your association with Mr. Gold. He’s a dangerous man. I would be quite happy to see the both of you leave – but since he has established himself and you have not, I have to settle with banishing _you.”_  

“The last time I checked, being mayor doesn’t give you the power to banish visitors just because you don’t like who they associate with.” Aura narrowed her eyes. “Your charges are groundless. You’ll be lucky if I don’t sue you for harassment when I get out of here.” 

“A suit you would lose, I’m afraid.”

Unfortunately, without any real evidence of what Regina had been doing in the past weeks, and with the local courts probably deep in the Mayor’s pockets, she was right. “I have every right to be here, and you know it.” Aura leaned closer to the bars, catching and holding Regina’s gaze with her own. She knew her eyes had gone pale and played on it, widening them just enough that she would look ever-so-slightly mad. If she couldn’t scare her with legal threats then she’d have to do it more directly. “If you think I’m just going to roll over and give up like everyone else in this town, think again. You don’t want to make an enemy of me, Mayor Mills.”

Regina just kept smiling. “It seems I already have. Why are you so adamant about staying here, Miss Grey? It’s just another town to you.”

“Because I have a place here. A good job. A purpose. A home. I’ve got as much claim to those as anyone, and I don’t appreciate it when people try to take them away.”

The smile disappeared, and Aura filed it away for future reference; something she’d said had struck a nerve. “I suggest you find another place to make your home.”

_Not a fucking chance,_ Aura snarled silently, though she kept her face still. She wouldn’t give Regina the satisfaction of seeing her lose her temper. Unlike so many of the people in Storybrooke, Aura didn’t fear the so-called Evil Queen. She had grown up in the care of a creature who inspired nightmares, and Regina was little more than petty and cruel, for all her supposed power. 

It was difficult, however, to win posturing games with someone from the wrong side of prison bars. The Sheriff reappeared just as Aura was contemplating making a grab for Regina’s throat, and fortunately for Regina’s continued ability to breath, he also had Gold in tow. “Mayor Mills, what a surprise,” Gold purred as he approached. “I didn’t expect you to take such a personal interest in this situation.” 

Regina’s lip lifted in a sneer. “It seems I’m not the only one. What are you doing here, Mr. Gold?”

“Why, I’m here to bail out my accountant.” He came closer, stopping a few feet away from the Mayor and resting his hands on his cane. “I need her services. And –” he leaned closer – “I think we all know that the charges against Miss Grey are baseless.”

The look on Regina’s face made Aura wish she could have captured it on film, because it was priceless – the fury of a woman who knew her plans were about to be thwarted. “Perhaps,” she said. “But an arrest leaves a black mark no matter what.” She looked at Aura and raised one brow. “Or have you already traded Mr. Gold enough _services_ to ensure that he’ll expunge your record for you?” Her tone made it quite clear what kind of ‘service’ she meant.

If she was trying to provoke Aura, she’d chosen the wrong rumor. Aura had already heard them all and now that she had her memories back, she simply didn’t care. There were far worse things she could be suspected of than sleeping with Mr. Gold – and if she had to resort to nastiness fulfill her bargain, it was better to let the lesser rumors persist as long as possible. Drawing on Rumpelstiltskin’s love of theatrics, Aura rested her forearms on a cross-bar and leaned forward, letting her lips rise in a sultry smile. “What do you think, Mayor Mills?” she drawled.

She’d almost forgotten about the Sheriff until she heard him drop something on the tile floor of the office. _Good,_ she thought. Between him and Regina, it wouldn’t take long before that little bit of gossip was stoked to fire. Even the Mayor looked a little taken aback, as if she couldn’t believe that someone could actually be attracted to the pawnbroker.

Gold hadn’t been startled at all; his features had shown a brief flash of approval, and then settled into a smug and ever-so-slightly lecherous expression. “If you two ladies will excuse me, I’m sure I have some paperwork to attend to,” he said smoothly, inclining his head at the Sheriff.

Regina sneered at him as he went to the back office with the Sheriff, and then turned back to Aura. “I don’t know what games you’re playing, but let me assure you that I will win. You’re a bad influence, Miss Grey, and I won’t have that sort of disturbance in my town.”

Aura held her gaze, letting the seductiveness drain from her expression. “Better a disturbance than a domineering autocrat,” she retorted. “Don’t you have a job to do, Madam Mayor, or have you cleared your schedule just so you can come down here and insult prisoners?”

The Mayor’s parting glance was so poisonous that Aura was surprised she didn’t break out in a rash. Gold wore a bemused expression when he returned, and she guessed that he’d heard at least a little of the exchange. Graham unlocked the cell, still looking a bit sheepish, and retrieved Aura’s things for her, then ushered the two of them out of the police station.

“You seem to have recovered quickly,” Gold commented as he led her to his car, an old black Cadillac.

Aura gave him a sideways glance. “Appearances can be deceiving.”

“Ah.” Gold unlocked the doors, then lowered himself into the driver’s seat and started the car as she took the passenger side. “You’re not interested in talking, I take it.”

Aura didn’t dignify that with an answer, because talking certainly wasn’t going to blunt the blow he’d delivered. As the car slid smoothly onto the main street, she stared out the window at the storefronts so she wouldn’t have to look at him. For a brief moment she entertained the fervent wish that she could go back to the way things had been the day before, when she’d been ignorant of her role in the curse and little more than a guilt-ridden, half-burned-out accountant.

“Regrets, dearie?”

“All of them,” she snapped, throwing him a furious glance. She turned back to the window to hide the tears that were threatening again, and that was all she would say for the rest of the ride.


	9. Steps Of The Dance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Plans are set in motion.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is long and a little convoluted, and I expect that it will be jossed at some point with respect to how Rumpelstiltskin got hold of Henry for Regina. I've left that bit deliberately vague (I know, a bit of a cop-out), but I've been trying to have this mirror canon as closely as I can manage. We'll see how it works!

Aura channeled her anger into industry and spent her weekend cleaning the third-floor apartment. It actually was a proper second residence, with its own kitchen and a separate outdoor entrance. Obviously Gold had held it against her return; there was no way he’d ever intended to rent the apartment to anyone in Storybrooke, even if they would have taken it.

The place seemed to be a repository for secondhand furniture, perhaps acquired from clients who’d lapsed on their loans, but it was all _old_ furniture and needed a thorough going-over. Aura tied up her hair in a kerchief and wore her oldest ripped jeans and an apron for the work, but by the end of the first day she was filthy, and suffering from allergies to boot. That there was at least three decades’ worth of dust in the apartment didn’t surprise her, because Rumpelstiltskin had never been a model housekeeper.

Sunday afternoon saw her sniffling and sneezing and scrubbing at her red and watering eyes, and she finally sat down on the sill of an open window to rest for a while. Once she stopped putting her efforts into work, her second set of memories presented themselves for her attention, and she spent a few vacant minutes staring at the trees in the house’s back yard, trying to recall her true life in the otherworld.

She wasn’t happy with what she remembered. Rumpelstiltskin had not been abusive or cruel, merely indifferent, for most of her childhood. But in the end he’d taken advantage of her unhappiness and her fear, and kept her ignorant of the true implications of her choice. Manipulation she could understand, if not forgive, but there was nothing she hated more than being ignorant. Allowing herself to be used because of what she didn’t know made her just as angry with him as she was with herself.

Aura didn’t realize that she was crying until the tears made dark spots on her dust-smeared apron. She scrubbed at her eyes, then swore as the dirt on her hands transferred itself to her face. 

“Crying, dear? Whatever for?”

Aura swung around on her perch and discovered Gold standing in the doorway to the inside staircase. He looked out of place in the old-fashioned kitchen, even in his shirtsleeves and without a tie. For a moment her memory overlaid a vision of him in leather and silk, and she shook her head to dispel the image. “I’m not crying. I have allergies,” she said shortly. She was in no mood to talk with him, although she knew mere rudeness wouldn’t make him go away.

“I think we both know it’s more than that,” he replied as he leaned his cane against the kitchen table and pulled out a chair. “The Aura I used to know would have deluged me with questions by now.” 

She slid to the floor, wiped her hands on her apron and looked away, concentrating on the branches of the tree closest to the house. “That girl was a fool.” 

“I wouldn’t say that.” 

“Wouldn’t you?” Aura turned abruptly, feeling her face going pale with anger. “I thought I knew how cruel you could be, but apparently even I underestimated your skill for destroying lives. If I’d known what you’d do just to get me back in your power, I’d have taken my chances with Regina.” Her voice rose with every word, and she clenched her fingers into fists to keep from lashing out at the man before her. “Did you kill those people to give me my _safety?_ Did you make that car crash? _Did you?”_  

There was a long, long silence while she stared him down, searching for any hint of emotion in his face. But there was nothing, barely even a twitch. He could have been carved from stone. His answer, when it came, was so soft she almost didn’t hear it. “No.” 

Aura’s breath caught in her throat. “No?” 

“No. I engineered the curse. I built in the loop of time that protected you, and I told it when to release you, with the stipulation that you be given a means to live safely outside of Storybrooke. But Regina enacted the magic, and she meant the spell to take away the happiness of her enemies. I gave you a life away from here, but I couldn’t stop Regina from twisting it to her ends.”

Aura closed her eyes and took a deep breath. If he was telling the truth – and she had the sinking feeling that he was – then they had both been criminally negligent for taking the chance that the curse could be used that way. The only difference between them was that he had known what might happen, and she had not. And Aura didn’t think that her ignorance was any kind of excuse for what she’d done. 

Gold went on, seeing that she wasn’t going to speak yet. “I had no way of controlling what Regina did to her victims. You knew that was a risk when you accepted the deal.” 

Aura’s eyes flew open. “You might not have cast the curse, but you knew what Regina would do with it.” She jabbed a finger at him. “Just like you knew what would happen when you let her into the Castle to threaten _me._ You knew she’d want to steal my abilities and you used it to scare me into taking the deal, didn’t you?” 

He barely blinked. “You sound very sure of that.” 

“Being foolish about the deal doesn’t mean I’m an imbecile,” she snapped back. “You knew the second anyone set foot on your lands and you certainly wouldn’t have overlooked Regina. You _let_ her get to me so I’d be frightened into thinking I needed your protection.” 

Gold spread his hands. “I had been keeping a close watch on her, Aura, and it was only a matter of time before she learned about you anyway. If I hadn’t brought you together then, where I could control the situation, then she would have found another way to get at you. You would either be caught up in the curse or dead.”

“Maybe it would have been better that way,” she said, thinking of the lives lost on her account. “Why, Rumpelstiltskin? Why did you ever even take me? Why did you _keep_ me?”

The abrupt change in topic made him pause. “Your parents made a bargain with me, and you were the price,” he said slowly. “But I made no deals whose price was a baby girl, and as the months went by I grew curious to see what kind of person you would become.” 

“So I was an experiment.”

“Perhaps…at first. But as time passed I realized that I wanted an ally. I am not a popular man here, or in the other world. To have the advantage of a partisan to my plans…” 

She laughed bitterly. “More a tool than a partisan, if all you were after was what you could get out of my blood. I suppose I should be flattered that it helped save _you_ from having to deal with a lifetime of false memories.” Her voice began to strangle with emotion, and she swallowed hard to get it under control. “Too bad it couldn’t protect me.” 

For a moment, he looked away, grimacing faintly. “Your blood protected us both. If I had been trapped by the curse, I would have had no way to set the events in motion that will eventually break it.” 

“I could wish you’d traded me away instead,” she murmured, rubbing her thumb over a scar that crossed her palm. “It would have been kinder.” 

His gaze flicked down to her hands. “I’m not a kind man, little goldfinch.” 

Something sickening twisted in her stomach. “Don’t,” she gasped. “My father… _Don’t call me that!”_ The curse must have pulled the endearment from her childhood with Rumpelstiltskin and given it to her memories of her father in this world; to hear it again was more than she could bear. She pushed past Gold and left the kitchen, stumbling into the furniture in her haste to get away from him. 

“Aura,” he called after her. 

“Leave me alone!” She finally found the bedroom door and ducked through, slamming it behind her. It was silly to try and hide from reality, but she just couldn’t bear another moment of it. Aura leaned back on the sturdy oak and slid to the floor in a disheveled heap, clutching at her chest where a great hollow had reopened itself. She’d felt the same way when she’d woken up in the hospital – like someone had torn her heart out. 

Regina was a master of that trick, Aura thought bitterly. Rumpelstiltskin hadn’t cared enough either way to make her illusory past so wrenching, but the Queen certainly would have wanted her as miserable as possible. It was that thought more than anything that reinforced Gold’s claim. 

The thunk of his cane in the hall outside her door was unmistakable, and she leaned harder against the wood, willing him to go away. He didn’t, of course. “Aura, we have things to discuss.” 

His voice was so much lower here, smoother, smoky – nothing like the high-pitched twittering he liked to use as Rumpelstiltskin. He’d exaggerated it when he wanted to annoy her back in the other world, because she knew he was capable of speaking normally and didn’t. Now he sounded so soothing, so much like her…but it wasn’t much consolation. “Not now,” she replied, trying to keep the tears out of her own voice. 

“You can’t shut me out forever.” 

“I can try.” Aura closed her eyes and let her head fall back against the door with a faint thud. “Just leave me alone!”

There was a long pause. “One more day,” he finally said. When she kept silent, she heard a faint sigh, the tapping of his cane and his footsteps retreating from the door, and the creaking of the stairs to the lower floors. She stayed where she was, pressed against the hard oak as if it could shield her from what lay beyond – from what she’d done. 

It couldn’t, but she could pretend, at least for a little while.

* * *

She avoided her housemate for the rest of the day. When it came down to it, she could be every bit the coward that Rumpelstiltskin was, and she would rather hide than face up to the confusing welter of memories he had provoked. Reasoning that she had to get groceries anyway, she scrubbed the worst of the dirt from her hands and changed into clean clothes before descending the servants’ stairs and heading for the store.

With Regina still on the warpath and the sheriff firmly in her pocket, Aura couldn’t drive her beloved Mustang without fear of getting stopped for some ridiculous infraction. Fortunately, Storybrooke was small enough that most things were within walking distance, and grocery shopping was doable as long as she didn’t buy too much. The climb up three flights of stairs was a pain, however, and Aura gratefully let her bags slump to the floor of the apartment’s kitchen when she reached it. 

The apartment was dark, but there were a number of mismatched lamps in the place, and she walked into the living room and turned on a floor lamp next to the battered leather couch. Intending to relax on the couch for a moment before packing away the groceries, Aura was distracted instead by what lay on the cushions. 

For a moment her tired mind couldn’t process it; she hadn’t left anything there when she’d gone shopping, so there wasn’t a reason for it to be there now. But when it registered on her what the thing was, she paused a moment more. It was a mandolin, an old-fashioned bowl-back one, its wood glowing softly in the lamplight. A round of mother-of-pearl inlay ringed the soundhole, and the back was veneered in blood-red wood. 

The instrument was beautiful, and it could only have come from one person, since she’d seen it before in Gold’s shop. But she also knew it well from the otherworld, since it had been hers. 

With a shaking hand Aura reached out to pick up the mandolin. It nestled into her arms perfectly, feeling like an old friend, and she lightly drew her thumb across the strings. They plunked faintly, a little out-of-tune but the tone still mellow. She let her fingers fall onto the frets and strummed a minor chord, closing her eyes and listening as it resonated and faded away. She’d played this instrument as a child, one of the amusements that she’d had to find for herself in the Dark Castle. Rumpelstiltskin had encouraged it, since it kept her out of worse trouble, and she’d found some solace in the instrument; that probably explained her dabbling in ensembles in college, in this world. 

But she couldn’t understand her master’s motives. Why would he do this? Was it a bribe, or a peace offering? Rumpelstiltskin had never been sentimental, and she couldn’t believe that he’d give it back just to make her feel better. Everything had a price with him. 

Aura set the mandolin down on the couch again and sat beside it. Everything about her life was confusing, now that what she had believed to be real had been revealed as illusion. Her past was a lie and the ten years she’d actually lived here had been wasted trying to hide from it. The only person she could claim a connection to owned her allegiance and had never given her true affection. Scratch confusing; it was downright depressing. 

She pressed her hands against her eyes. She would _not_ cry again. Self-pity was useless, weakness, and that was something she couldn’t afford to show anymore. The people she’d killed deserved her tears, but to wallow in despair would be to spit on the lives they’d lost for her sake. She couldn’t do it forever. 

Aura left the mandolin on the couch and went back to the kitchen, pulling items from her grocery bags and jamming them into place in the refrigerator and on cabinet shelves. Better to replace despair with anger; that at least would sustain her, unhealthy thought it was. 

Finished with the unpacking, she returned to the living room and took up the mandolin once more, tuning the strings with abrupt little jerks of the pegs. Once the strings were adjusted to her satisfaction, she launched into a complicated piece, taking satisfaction in the way the sound carried from the venerable instrument. When that piece was finished she started another, and another, and kept playing far into the night. She poured her anger into the music, choosing songs that challenged her skill and rendering them with a vicious precision.

“Let him think about _that_ ,” she said when she stopped at last. The clock on one of the bookshelf told her that the night was half over, but as she sat there in silence, she heard the distant creak of a floorboard from the house below. The creaking was soft, as though someone were trying to keep from being heard, but Aura smiled in satisfaction. If her demons kept her up at night, she saw no reason why he should sleep easily either. 

She switched off the light and sat for a while in the dark, thinking. It was clear that Gold was the one with the power in Storybrooke, even if Mayor Mills assumed that she had the upper hand. And if Regina hadn’t managed to do that after twenty-eight years, she was either complacent or ignorant of her position – or both. 

Aura hated the woman. Not only for what she’d done here, but from the other world, where she’d tortured Aura with nightmarish visions to try and steal Rumpelstiltskin’s secrets from her. She’d like nothing better than to see the witch fall, so her wishes and Rumpelstiltskin’s were aligned in that sense. 

But Aura was a woman grown, no longer a girl blinded by his influence – that was one thing his curse had granted her. She had the advantage of experience, a set of morals grounded in her own beliefs rather than just his, and she was going to trade on of every bit of that experience to make sure she didn’t make any more decisions that would backfire on her. 

Regina was not the real reason he’d crafted the spell. He’d hinted at that before. But she’d not even begun to unravel that secret when Regina’s plotting forced her to act so hastily. Now, if she was going to fulfill her deal, she needed to know what he was hiding from her. He’d be expecting her to challenge him; her personality in either world demanded it. If she did it right, though, she could start picking apart the deeper mystery of the curse without alerting him to her motives.

She was still heartsick, and that wouldn’t change anytime soon. But she couldn’t sit around doing nothing, or simply let things happen to her; that was to invite further disaster. She needed to fight her own ignorance, no matter how long it took.

* * *

Aura went into work at her normal time the next morning despite the upsets of the day before. She needed stability and routine so she didn’t spend all her time dwelling on what pained her. It worked, but only as long as she didn’t give herself time to think about anything but the task before her.

Now that she knew who he was, Gold had asked her to start working on his contracts, which was going to be no small task. She’d figured her way through the majority of the bookkeeping, but not yet begun organizing what paper records he had of his deals. In what little she’d seen of them, she noticed that most of the agreements dealing with property were scrupulously noted – a necessary measure, since they were the most likely to be legally challenged – but there were quite a few other deals that had gone unrecorded.

They were presumably oral agreements; loan sharking, she thought with distaste, was profitable but not something that one generally wanted recorded for posterity. The card file that sat on one of the shop’s counters was purely for show, since the cards were all blank. But it was all there in the shop accounts, for anyone who had the patience to look for it. Transactions for antiques that far outstripped their value, mysterious sums that appeared with regularity and were marked as layaways; a truly astonishing amount of money passed through Gold’s hands on a regular basis. No wonder the town treated him like the boogeyman. 

Since he didn’t want a computerized system to keep track of the paper contracts – the man had a mechanical cash register, for pity’s sake – she was doing it the hard way: with paper and ink. She’d been forced to devise a complicated cross-referenced filing system of a kind that hardly existed anymore, in this age of electronics. It required strict attention to detail, and Aura lost herself in it for several days before Gold troubled her again.

Late one afternoon he came to find her in the space he’d allotted for her use, chair situated at the center of a veritable Stonehenge of piles of papers and books, balanced precariously on every available flat surface. A huge old-fashioned ledger sat in her lap, and an assortment of fountain pens filled the mug that she no longer used for tea (proper teacups being more familiar, now that she had her memories back). She didn’t look up when he came in, but said as she inked another entry, “Don’t move anything – I’ve just got it all in order.” 

There was amusement in his voice when he replied. “I would never have guessed there was an order to all…this.” 

Aura raised a brow, nonplussed. “It’s a spatial technique. Your filing system, by the way, sucks. Would it have killed you to buy a computer?” 

“It would likely have killed the computer. There’s enough magic in the things in this shop that the two would not coexist well for long.” 

Her mouth twitched. “And the first time the thing crashed you’d probably put that cane through the monitor.” 

Gold refrained from rolling his eyes, but only just. “The contracts will keep. I thought today would be a good opportunity to show you the town.” 

Aura sighed and carefully extricated herself from her nest. “I’ve seen the town. It’s coastal Maine, it’s pretty, it’s isolated, and it’s cursed. Why do I need another tour?”

He smiled. “The first of the month is rent day, dearie. It’s time you met the players in Regina’s little game, and I want to see how well your intuition serves you in seeing past their mundane selves. I trust you remember your fairy tales?”

“Well enough.” In the memories the curse had given her, she saw herself as a small child, sitting on the floor with a massive old book filled with stories by the Grimm brothers and Hans Christian Anderson, delighted by the illustrations and rapt with attention when one parent or the other read the tales to her. “You want me to guess who they are?” 

Gold shook his head. “Guessing is for children. I want you to deduce. You’ve always been observant, and Regina, bless her shriveled little heart, has left so many clues lying about it’s a wonder half the town hasn’t worked it out for themselves.” 

Aura was flattered by the complement, but she didn’t let it show, not with him. She leaned over a pile of contracts and retrieved the most recent rent ledger from her desk – thankfully it was a small one – then tucked it into her shoulderbag and followed Gold out into the shop. “This is not going to do anything for my popularity,” she grumbled. 

“I should think working for me has already ruined any prospect of popularity,” Gold said, making his way through the curtain that divided the front room from the back. He picked up a bank deposit bag along the way and handed it to her; now that she remembered everything, it seemed that he was going to thrust her right back into the role of gofer. Aura stuck out her tongue at him when his back was turned. 

He drove them to the farther reaches of town, but for the visits on the main street he seemed to prefer to walk, despite his bad leg. (She hadn’t yet got around to asking him about that, but the first time he asked her to hand his cane out of the car, she’d held onto it for a second longer than she needed to and given him a look. It was better to warn him the question was coming; she was never sure how he’d react to something sprung on him.)

Apparently the walking was all part of the act, perhaps to give his victims more time to sweat while he hobbled deliberately down the sidewalk, because every single person Aura met that evening looked like they were facing down a poisonous snake even when they had the rent ready. Some of them watched her just as warily, but the majority kept their attention on Gold, rightly assuming that he was the more dangerous of the pair of them. It meant that she got to observe quite a bit without being noticed.

Some of the denizens of their old land were easy for her to spot even though she only knew them by reputation. Snow White’s beauty was undiminished by a boyishly short haircut and the drab clothing she wore in her position as a teacher at the parochial school, and Cinderella had been stuck in an appropriately menial job at the Laundromat, though Aura was surprised to see that she was also pregnant and, presumably, unmarried. It took longer for her to realize that Sheriff Humbert was none other than Regina’s fabled Huntsman, or that the Granny who ran the Inn was none other than the Granny of Little Red Riding Hood fame (and that her granddaughter Ruby was not only Red Riding Hood but the wolf as well). 

Gold confirmed or denied her deductions as she made them, choosing to whisper the conversations when they were in view of other townspeople. Aura knew it was calculated to set people on edge, and she didn’t appreciate being included in the playacting, but she gritted her teeth and restrained herself from protesting. As the evening wore on, she became more and more disgusted with Regina’s choices crafting the personas for her enemies. Sure, making the legendary Snow White into a meek and prim elementary school teacher was a bit of a dig, but slotting Gepetto into a handyman’s job and (according to Gold) leaving Prince Charming in a coma in the hospital showed a complete lack of imagination at best. 

Had Aura been so inclined to punish her enemies, she mused at one point, she would have done worse than banish them to the suburbs. Not that she was going to bother with anything so complicated, when she finally had to face down Regina. Some good-old fashioned humiliation and a sharp axe would be good enough.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of Gold’s customers liked to pay in cash, and the deposit bag was getting quite heavy by the time they finished his rounds. He didn’t bother dropping it in the bank’s after-hours slot – who had guts enough to steal from the town bogeyman, after all? The money would be safe enough at home until the bank reopened the next day. 

“So,” Aura said as they climbed the steps of the pink house. “Regina’s having a grand time ruling over her little kingdom here, but you said you would bring me back to help defeat her. Obviously that’s not going to happen while the curse is still in place, so what’s your plan for breaking it?”

She caught Gold’s faint smile as he set the key in the door and let them into the house. “Not what, dearie. _Who.”_  

Aura paused on the threshold. _“Who?_ You mean there’s someone else who knows about the curse?” 

“Not yet. But she will. You see, before Regina cast the curse, Snow White and her Prince Charming had a daughter. Emma.” He said the name as if he was savoring a particularly tasty bit of candy. “They found a way to send her to this world before the curse hit. She grew up ignorant of it, and what her role will be in breaking it.” 

Aura followed him into the kitchen, where she set down the deposit bag and perched on a barstool, watching him go through the motions of boiling water for tea. “How’s she going to find her way back here if she doesn’t know anything about Storybrooke?”

“Ah. Well, that will take some doing. You see, there is one other person who knows about the curse – and he can leave Storybrooke. He’s suspected for some time that all is not as it seems in our little town and he’s recently come into possession of a rather unique book.” 

She rolled her eyes. “Let me guess – you had a hand in providing the book.” 

Gold wagged a finger. “Can’t give too much of the game away, dearie. That’s not sporting.”

Aura huffed in exasperation. He wasn’t going to tell her – and with him, guessing was usually fruitless. He was just as likely to claim knowledge of something he had no involvement with as not. “Fine. Do I have to work out who this person is, or will you cut me a break?” 

He turned and leaned his elbow on the counter for a moment. “You’ve already met him.” 

He was going to make her guess. But it shouldn’t be hard – she’d met so few of the town’s residents. It couldn’t be anyone whose fairy-tale identity Gold had made her guess, so that left…Aura’s eyes widened. “Henry? Regina’s son?” 

“Very good.” He smiled, and went back getting out one of his china teapots. “In point of fact, Henry is Regina’s _adopted_ son. He was never part of the curse. And his book talks about the Savior who will come to free the people trapped in Storybrooke.” 

“Emma.” Aura propped her chin up on one hand. “We can’t leave Storybrooke to find her ourselves…but Henry can. You want me to get Henry to look for her? Why would he go looking for a woman he’s never met?” 

Gold smiled, and Aura groaned inwardly; she knew that look. It was his ‘mysterious sorcerer’ look, and it meant he was going to cut off the explanations and make her figure out the rest on her own. Sometimes she hated his idea of a learning experience. “Why would any adopted child go looking for a woman he’s never met?” 

This time, Aura groaned out loud. “He would if he were looking for his biological mother. Seven hells, Gold, are you telling me that this Emma of yours is his biological mother? There’s no _way_ you could have planned that, even with your memory!” 

He shrugged. “It was a closed adoption, but the facilitator is allowed some information about the birth family. Emma was the name given for his mother, and she was of age at the time.” 

“You? You arranged the adoption?” 

“I’m the one people in this town come to when they want to conduct affairs of…questionable legality. Naturally, Regina would approach me if she wanted to quietly acquire a child.”

Aura shook her head helplessly. “No one relies that much on luck and succeeds, Rumpelstiltskin. You don’t honestly expect me to believe that you went into this just hoping that your Savior would have a child and that Regina would want one of her own. That’s ludicrous. You _must_ have been tracking Emma somehow. That’s why you wanted to retain your memories, isn’t it?”

Gold chuckled, obviously taking pleasure in her disgruntled protests. “I’ll let you decide that for yourself dearie. At the moment, what matters is getting young Henry to go look for his birth mother – and _that_ is what I want you to arrange.” 

Aura sat up straight and ran a hand wearily through the curls that had escaped her bun. “Me? I can’t go near Henry. Regina would crucify me.”

“Then she mustn’t know you’ve done it.” The teakettle was steaming now, and he carefully poured the hot water into the pot to warm it. “I can’t go near him without raising Regina’s hackles, and she keeps a close watch on me. You, she believes defeated, for the moment. If you are clever about it...”

Aura narrowed her eyes at him. “You’re not asking much.” She tapped her fingers on the countertop because she knew it would annoy Gold. “Does that mean Henry is the only one in the whole town who ages? Regina’s the same as she was thirty years ago and so are you.” 

“Unfortunately, yes. But Henry is the only one aside from us who realizes it.” 

“Fuck. That’s enough to drive anyone nuts. That poor kid,” she said. “And you want me to mess with him more? That’s low even for you, Rumpelstiltskin.”

Water steamed as he dumped out the teapot in the sink. Ladling leaves from a tin with somewhat more force than tea warranted, Gold poured more hot water into the pot and put the lid on it with a clank of china. “It’s necessary. And it shouldn’t be necessary to remind you that _you_ work for _me,_ Aura. You’re going to plant the idea of looking for Emma with Henry. Try not to let Regina notice you at it.” 

She recognized that warning tone, and let her indignation deflate just a bit. She _did_ work for him, and she wouldn’t ignore a contract just because she was unhappy with it. She had more honor than that. 

The kitchen was steeped in silence as they waited for the tea to brew; Gold wordlessly poured out two cups and set them on saucers. Hers had no spoon but his did, since he had a liberal hand with sweeteners and she took her tea black. Aura’s lips curled ever so slightly at the sight, both in amusement at the Dark One’s sweet tooth and with the absurdity of such a mundane routine between them.

Gold leaned against the counter, stirring some honey into his tea before he lifted the cup to his lips. “Questions, dearie?” he asked, looking over the rim of the cup at her.

She lifted a brow at him, certain that the bland mask she tended to wear when she was thinking hard around Rumpelstiltskin hadn’t slipped. He read people too easily, and she’d long ago learned to hide her thoughts. He’d once claimed, in a fit of pique, that it made her look like a dullard, but she was just glad to know that she could mask _something_ from him. “Those children’s books up in my apartment. Are you particularly attached to them?”

Gold smiled, and she could see that he had already worked out how she was going to approach Henry. “They’re all yours.” 

* * *

It took her a few days to work out Henry’s schedule – and Regina’s – and Aura waited that long before arranging to fall in with him. Granny’s Diner would have been the best place to ‘meet’ him, but Regina was the one who picked him up there and it was too risky. So she made sure that she had an errand that took her past the elementary school when it let out one afternoon, and she took a stack of books with her.

Henry was easy to pick out; the boy’s smile was infectious, and of course he recognized her. “Hi, Miss Grey,” he called, waving at her as she pretended to be absorbed in her errand.

Aura looked up in feigned surprise, and let a genuine smile spread across her own face. “Hey, Henry, how’s it going?” she said, purposefully bobbling the stack of books she was carrying.

“Whoops!” Henry cried as one slid off the top of the stack. “You lost one.” He stooped and retrieved the book, holding it out for her.

“Thanks,” she said, pretending to struggle with the pile. “I knew I shouldn’t have carried so many of these.” 

“I can take some if you need help,” he offered eagerly. “Where are you taking them?” 

She surrendered part of the stack to his hands and sighed in relief. “They’re for the school. Mr. Gold asked me to clear them out of the shop and since there’s no library here, I thought you guys could use them.” Aura paused by the school gate. “If you help me carry them in, I’ll let you pick one before I put them in the donation box.” 

“Sure! Come on, it’s up by the office.” He led her up the short flight of stone steps that led to the school, and she nodded at one of the nuns as she pointed to the donation box that sat just inside the door. The woman gave her a watery smile and stood aside, obviously having heard their conversation from her post, and Aura knelt by the box to let Henry pick out what he wanted before she stacked the rest of the books inside it. 

He chose the Grimm, as she’d expected and planned. “Fairy tales a favorite of yours?” she asked, dusting off her trousers and following him out of the school. 

“Oh. Yeah. I have another book, but I, uh, wanted to see if these were any different.” He looked up at her, his nose wrinkled up in consternation. “Don’t tell my mom about this if you see her, okay? She doesn’t like me reading this kind of stuff.” 

Aura kept her demeanor calm, but she was cheering inwardly. She’d been hoping he would mention Regina. “She doesn’t sound like much fun,” she said casually. “What’s wrong with reading books?” 

Henry slumped a little as they walked back down the sidewalk. “She’s just…really strict sometimes.” He looked up at Aura and said carefully, “She’s not really my mom, you know.” 

“Oh?” 

“She adopted me. She’s really – ” He stopped, looking nervous.

Aura gave him her most reassuring smile. “Hey, it’s okay. I promised I wouldn’t tell her about this, remember? You can say what you want.”

“Ooookay,” Henry said slowly. “You know the story about Snow White and the Evil Queen?” 

She did indeed – the tale had reached even the Dark Castle. “Yes.”

“Well…in my book, there are a lot of illustrations. And some of them look like the people here in Storybrooke, but one of them is _definitely_ of my mom. And she’s the Evil Queen.” 

Good gods, was Rumpelstiltskin _trying_ to drive the boy insane? Who else could he have gotten such a book from? Well, she sure as hell wasn’t going to make it worse on Henry. She thought carefully before she answered. “Maybe,” she said slowly, “whoever wrote the book lives here and knows the same people, and used their faces for the pictures.”

Henry gave her a long-suffering look. “I knew you wouldn’t believe me. No one does.” He started to walk faster, but Aura jogged to catch up with him. 

“Henry, wait,” she said. “I didn’t say I don’t believe you.” 

He stopped at that. “But you tried to explain it away, just like everyone else.” 

Aura crouched a little to put herself on his level. “I believe that you believe what you’re telling me is the truth,” she said carefully. Words were important, and she genuinely felt sorry for the boy; she knew what it felt like to be isolated from a world that wouldn’t believe you because of who you were. Gods knew she’d experienced enough of that in the Dark Castle. “Strange things do happen,” she went on. “If you think that your book is about real people, then maybe it is.” She smiled a little. “Are you in there?” 

“Nope. Because the Evil Queen isn’t really my mom, remember?” 

“Right.” She looked back and forth, as if checking to see if they had eavesdroppers. “Actually, I'm adopted too,” she said confidentially. 

"Really?" Henry looked up in surprise. "Did you always know that?"

Rumpelstiltskin had taught her that prevarication worked best when it was done using the truth, and to be honest, she didn’t want to lie to Henry if she could avoid it. His entire life had been a lie, of sorts, and he deserved a little consideration. “At first, I didn’t,” she said truthfully. “But there are ways to find out who your birth family is even if the adoption was private. There’s a lot of stuff on the internet now, too,” she added in an offhand manner, standing again. “Search services and the like. I swear, you can get anything done online with a little work and a credit card.”

She made sure to glance down at her companion before she started walking again, and was relieved to see that the suggestion had taken hold; Henry’s expression had brightened again, and he was looking thoughtfully at the book he’d chosen. “Right. I, uh, have to get home now, Miss Grey. Thanks so much for the book!”

Aura offered a hand, and Henry pumped it enthusiastically. “Thanks for your help, Henry. Listen, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell your mom you talked to me. She doesn’t like me much.”

He nodded vigorously. “I won’t. I promise. Bye!” 

She watched as he ran down the street, full of plans and schemes, and she smiled delightedly. Regina was going to be _furious_ when she found out what he was up to; Aura would give real money to see that. She whistled a little as she made her way at a more sedate pace down the sidewalk.  Rumpelstiltskin was known, in part, for being a trickster – and enough of that had rubbed off on her that she wouldn’t pass up the chance to cause a little mischief of her own.


	10. In Vino Veritas Est

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aura misbehaves.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Things are going to get dark here for a while...be warned.

After a week or so of behaving, Aura decided it was time to misbehave on purpose, and learn something about the curse. She pleaded a migraine and stayed home from the shop one day, then waited until Gold was long gone. She packed an overnight bag, turned off her cell and traded it for the pay-as-you-go cell that she kept for emergencies, and carefully locked up the apartment. It took only a moment to descend the three flights of stairs, another to close and lock the outer door, and a third to toss her bag into her Mustang, start up the engine and pull out of the driveway.

She took a back road out of town, since the main strip went right past the shop and she had a distinctive car. Her goal wasn’t to run away completely but to test the terms of her contract – and the limits of the curse. Were there consequences to leaving without Gold’s knowledge? Could she move freely beyond the boundaries of the town, or did the curse bind her, now that she had her memories back?

Her heart began to pound as she approached the ‘Welcome to Storybrooke’ sign, just past the toll bridge. Someone had inked in an extra ‘R’ on the bridge’s sign, a joke she appreciated, though it also made her wonder just how air-tight the curse was. This was nominally the boundary of the town, though there was no telling what the curse – or Rumpelstiltskin – considered its outer limits.

The bridge gave her no problems, as long as she kept her eyes on the road and didn’t think about the last time she’d been there, the broken glass and blood…But the instant she passed the welcome sign she had the answer to her questions about the curse’s boundary. All at once she was dizzy, weak, gasping for breath, just as she had been in the shop with the spindle; it was all she could do to jam her foot on the brake. In doing so, she ran halfway into the ditch at the side of the road and ended up clinging to her seat so she wouldn’t slide out of it.

It felt exactly like having one of the episodes caused by her anemia: her heart pounded, her chest felt as if someone had slammed a hammer into it, her limbs were weak and watery, and she couldn’t seem to get enough air. And it wasn’t momentary. If anything, the sensations grew worse the longer she sat there. Lungs heaving, she clutched at the gearshift and forced it into reverse, then shifted her foot and leaned her weight on it. The car lurched, tires squealing where they still touched pavement, but finally heaved itself up out of the ditch. Aura reversed it down the road for half a mile, lurched it into a multipoint turn, and then pulled over.

As soon as she’d backed away from the boundary, the sensations that afflicted her had faded until they were only nauseating. Once the car stopped, she snapped off the ignition and shoved her door open. She needed air, and the car was suddenly stifling. Leaning heavily on the hood, she went around it until she could slump against the front fender and take deep, shivery breaths.

Well, she’d suspected that something like this might happen, but she’d never guessed it would be so dramatic. If she hadn’t gotten herself back to ‘safe’ ground, the episode could have knocked her unconscious; it was a bit like having asthma and a heart attack at the same time. In fact, it could have turned into a heart attack if she’d been stuck there long enough.

“Fuck,” Aura swore breathily. She was _trapped._ She’d often wondered why the townspeople never left, and here was her answer: they couldn’t, if the curse bound them all the same way. Rumpelstiltskin had been pretty explicit about letting her know that _she_ was now a part of the curse, and apparently the same constraints now applied to her. Escape was out of the question.

It was a good while before she felt ready to drive again, and Aura clung tightly to the Mustang’s steering wheel the whole way back, taking comfort in its solidity. For a few moments there, she’d felt oddly _thin_ , like a stiff breeze might have blown her away.

Gravel crunched under her tires as she pulled into the small parking area behind the shop. Gold’s car was there, but the lights were off in the workroom, so she went around the front of the building instead. The obnoxious little bell tinkled cheerfully when she shoved the door open – and today it was _really_ getting on her nerves – and of course he was waiting for her, smiling that smug smile of his.

“I was wondering when you would try to leave,” Gold said, resting his arms on the counter. “Did you find out what you wanted?”

Aura’s nose flared as she sucked in a breath. “If you mean, did I find out just how close I could get to having a heart attack, yes,” she said, voice tight. “I could have _died_. You couldn’t have found a more subtle way to enforce the contract, could you?”

He spread his hands. “The curse acts on its own, dearie. I can’t manipulate it in this world. Surely you don’t expect me to apologize for that?”

Seeing as it was well-nigh impossible to get him to apologize for something when it _was_ his fault, she knew better than to expect it at all. “Bloody hell,” Aura muttered, and then stormed through the curtain that divided the workroom and her office from the rest of the shop. The office had no door for her to slam, but she gave her desk a good kick and began venting her frustration in every filthy term she’d ever learned from Rumpelstiltskin and a few from the rougher bits of Boston. It wasn’t as satisfying as smashing things, but everything in the shop belonged to her employer and she didn’t think he’d take kindly to that. Verbal abuse would have to do.

When the floor creaked behind her she turned around, not missing a beat in the tirade. “And you can go and boil your head!” she shouted, her accent much more pronounced in her anger.

When she saw his face, she was almost screamed. He was _laughing._ A quiet chuckle, not the hair-raising giggle he’d cultivated in the old world, but the old bastard was _laughing at her._ Aura dearly wished she could hit him, but demurred to her better judgment instead, shoving a pile of paperwork off her chair and plunking into it with more force than the elderly thing was meant to handle. “It’s not funny,” she snapped.

Gold smiled; he clearly thought it was. “Your vocabulary has expanded,” he said.

“I’m so happy you noticed. Hooray for me.”

“Do you feel better?”

She let out a long breath through her nose. “Marginally,” she admitted. “But I still wouldn’t mind seeing you stick your head in a pot.”

“Och, now, lass,” he replied, letting his own accent grow stronger. “Ye’ve no one to blame but yerself, you know. You made a deal with me of your own free will.”

Aura made a face. “Yes, when I was eighteen and stupid. Funny how that never seems to work out well.”

“Ah, well. Better luck next time, I suppose.”

That was the last straw. “Out,” Aura snapped, pointing to the doorway.

“You’re ordering me out of my own shop?”

“Do you _want_ to find out if I’ll get mad enough to break your cane over your head?”

Gold gave her a mocking bow and withdrew from the doorway. “Now that you’ve got that out of your system, you might apply yourself to the rest of the contracts.”

Aura shook her head, then let it thump slowly onto the desktop. “Sure. Fine. Just leave me alone, will you?”

That night, Aura took refuge in a back corner of the town’s nicer bar with an entire bottle of Scotch whiskey and a glass. Her performance that afternoon hadn’t been entirely an act. Oh, she’d been histrionic partly for Gold’s sake; better for him to think she was acting her old self and chafing at his control, rather than picking away at the curse itself. But her unhappiness at the discovery that she was trapped in Storybrooke hadn’t been feigned. She’d somehow assumed she could still come and go as she pleased, but it seemed that in returning her memories, Rumpelstiltskin had bound her even tighter into the curse’s hold. It was a terribly claustrophobic feeling, and after years of being trapped in the Dark Castle, she didn’t like it one bit.

There were a few men at the bar who either didn’t know or didn’t care that she worked for Gold, and tried to approach her, but she behaved so rudely that they eventually gave up. The third one actually called her a bitch before he walked away, but she didn’t care. All she wanted was to be left in peace to work her way to the bottom of the bottle.

She’d made good progress on it by the time the bar’s bouncer – a massively tall bald man, built like a wrestler, of course - came over to her. “I think it’s time you went home, Miss,” he said politely, edging the bottle away from her. “We’ll be getting ready to close soon.”

Aura scowled at him. The alcohol had dulled her emotions somewhat, but not nearly enough, and she knew damn well that the bar wouldn’t be closing so early on a Saturday. “Look, I’m sorry I was rude to those guys earlier, but I didn’t want to talk to anyone,” she said, her accent stronger but her words still precise; she’d never been a sloppy drunk. “Just let me finish my bottle, all right?”

The man – gods, had he been an ogre in the otherworld? – nipped the bottle off the table. “We try to look out for our customers, Miss,” he said, holding the whiskey out of her reach. “You’ve had a lot to drink. Do you need me to call someone to take you home?”

She heaved a sigh. She didn’t want to end up in the prison again, and if she made a fuss now the bouncer would probably call the Sheriff to bring her in. “No, thanks,” she said, turning the tumbler over on the table with a crack and picking up her purse and coat. “I can walk.”

The bouncer put a hand under her elbow when she swayed (what had possessed her to wear high-heeled shoes today?) and escorted her to the door. “We’ll be happy to put the rest of the bottle on account,” he said, still playing the nice guy. She didn’t doubt that would have changed in a second if she’d fought with him, but she wasn’t a belligerent drunk, either. Just an acerbic one.

“Yeah, sure,” she muttered, shivering a bit when the cool outside air hit her. The door thumped closed behind her, and she swore bitterly as she shoved her arms into her coat sleeves. Shit, she was just pathetic. Sure, Rumpelstiltskin had turned her life upside down, given her a whole new past to consider, told her she had to obey his wishes and help with this plan that she barely understood. That would be enough to upset anyone. But what did she do? She made one half-hearted attempt to break his control and then tried to drink herself into oblivion.

Pathetic. Sad and pathetic. And now here she was, out a half bottle of crappy blended Scotch and shivering in the parking lot of a bar. Aura pulled her coat up around her neck and began trudging unsteadily in the direction of Gold’s house. She wasn’t used to the walk yet, and it took her a few minutes to remember which cross street to take once she left the main strip. Fortunately, Storybrooke was pretty well lit for a small town – probably one of Regina’s little projects to placate the populace.

The lighting didn’t stop her from wheeling around, purse in hand, when she heard the click of footsteps behind her. And, oh, wasn’t _this_ the last person she wanted to see.

Mr. Gold’s mouth quirked a little as he approached; obviously he was surprised to see her here, since she had no real friends and didn’t go out much at night. He must have been working late at the shop and just now started on his way home, she figured, although his normal route shouldn’t have taken him past the bar. “What the hell are you doing here?” Aura demanded ill-humoredly, pulling her purse back up to her shoulder.

“News travels fast in a small town,” Gold replied, falling into step beside her. “Go about savaging the local barflies and you’ll get yourself a reputation to rival mine. Was that your goal?”

She snorted, in no mood to be polite. “I’m doing my best to get stinking drunk. And I would have if that stupid bouncer hadn’t kicked me out.” She scuffed her shoes on the sidewalk. “Guess I’m just going to have to buy my own booze and do it at home.”

When she tripped on a raised bit of concrete, Gold’s hand shot out to steady her. “I’d prefer it if you didn’t,” he said, not releasing her arm. “We’ve already got one town drunk, and it wouldn’t reflect very well on me if it looked like I’d hired another.”

“What are you, my father? I thought you didn’t care about reputations.” Aura retorted. “Seven hells, I wish I’d never come to this miserable place. I could have stayed in Boston. But no, I just had to have a change of scenery!” She waved her free hand around her, intending to encompass the entire town. “Now look at me, trapped in this place with a bunch of fucking fractured fairy tales.”

Gold still hadn’t let go of her, but she was feeling too wobbly to complain about it. “All magic – ”

“Comes with a price. Gods, I _hate_ it when you say that. Don’t you think I know?” She was glad she didn’t have to work to keep up with him; the cane kept him from going too quickly. “Ten years and all I’ve got to show are a murdered family and a soulless career. Fucking wasted.”

He didn’t reply right away, and she peered at him, wondering if her words had had any impact – but no, surely not on the dreaded Rumpelstiltskin. He had never been one for pity. His hand tightened on her arm, and he steered her into a turn; they’d reached the front walk of his house. “Past time for bed,” he said quietly. “I’ll make sure you get up the stairs.”

“I am not _that_ drunk,” she growled, descending farther into a truly foul mood as they climbed the steps.

He laughed softly. “You’re a poor liar, Aura. Frankly, I’m impressed you’re still on your feet.”

“Don’t be so damn patronizing.”

“Curb your temper,” he replied, a little more sharply than before. He produced a key and slid it into the lock. “Being drunk won’t excuse everything. You’re going to bed, and you’re going to take yourself up there. I’m not carrying you.”

She waited for him to push the door open, then brushed past him into the foyer. “Yeah, I guess that would be hard for you, wouldn’t it?” The comment was petty and cruel, but she wasn’t feeling particularly generous at the moment. She wanted to snap and bite and claw at Gold, wanted to provoke _some_ kind of reaction, even if it meant he savaged her in return. It would be better than feeling… _anything,_ anymore.

But the infuriating man refused to take the bait. “Go to bed,” he said flatly, flipping on the light in the entryway.

Seething, Aura stomped forward. She forgot the two short steps leading into the living room and tripped, slamming to her knees on the hard wood floorboards. The impact drove a cry from her lips, but when she felt Gold’s hand on her shoulder she yanked out of his grip. “Don’t touch me!” she snarled, knocking his hand away and fumbling to get her feet under her.

Her heeled shoes refused to give her purchase and she savagely kicked them off, hearing them collide with Gold’s legs and not caring a whit. She finally got her feet under her and used a side table to haul herself upright. “Haven’t you done enough? Haven’t you had enough lives to manipulate? Why did you have to ruin mine?”

He hadn’t tried to touch her again, remaining in the foyer with the dim light casting harsh shadows on the planes of his face. “I’m sorry if your freedom didn’t live up to your expectations, _dearie,_ ” he said, his accent heavy on each syllable. “You didn’t have to sign that contract.”

Aura laughed, loudly and harshly and high, like Rumpelstiltskin once had. “Of course I didn’t! Because waiting for Regina to get her claws into me would have been so much better!” She was wearing a thin cardigan over her shirt and slacks, and she ripped the garment off, flinging it to the floor. “It’s never _your_ fault. So who _should_ I blame for the scars? Who should I blame for the psychologists who thought I’d gone insane?” There was enough light to reflect off of the pale lines crisscrossing her skin, and she thrust her arms at him, palms out. “Whose account do I put these to, Rumpelstiltskin?”

Her voice rose with each word; the alcohol hadn’t dulled the pain, it had only dulled her ability to keep from thinking about it, and the only thing she could think to do was drown it out. “Who?” she screamed one last time, then stood there, chest heaving as she glared wild-eyed at Gold.

For a moment, neither of them moved. Gold’s face was impassive, controlled, and for a wild moment Aura wanted to strike him just to get a reaction. But she didn’t quite dare, so she kept her distance. After a moment she realized that her hands were shaking, and she stuffed them under her arms, hunching over. If she pressed them close maybe she could keep the rest of her from shaking to pieces, because that was what she felt she was about to do.

Slowly, Gold made his way up the short stairwell. He dropped his keys on the side table and then faced her, eyes hooded and mouth drawn into a thin line. It was only the alcohol that kept her from flinching when he rested one hand on her shoulder and brushed his thumb over the ridged scar tissue on her collarbone; she stood like a hunted animal, transfixed, as he moved the hand down her arm. He drew his palm over her forearm and the deep slash he’d made there. “I would not have chosen this for you,” he said, his voice deep and quiet. “I would like to make allowance for your grief, Aura, but you are a part of plans set in motion long ago, and I can’t halt them.”

It took a moment for the words to sink in. She’d expected derision, expected him to mock her for her naiveté; she’d certainly tried hard enough to spur him to it. But what he’d said was…almost kindness. And he had _touched_ her, not in pantomime or for effect but for…what? Comfort?

Rumpelstiltskin was not a comforting person, never had been, save for a few rare occasions when she’d been a small child. But in later years he’d always left her to weather emotional storms on her own, seeming uncomfortable with her outbursts. Now, she didn’t know how to respond to this new incarnation of her master. Something had happened to change him in the years since she’d left the Dark Castle, but she couldn’t fathom what it had been.

While Aura was still wrestling with her confusion, Gold backed away and stooped to scoop up her discarded shoes and sweater. He pushed them into her hands and put a hand on her shoulder to turn her toward the back of the house. “Go sleep it off. You’ll feel better in the morning.”

She obeyed, letting him guide her through the dining room and kitchen to the back stairwell. She was unsteady on her feet and stubbed her toes on any number of bits of furniture, but Gold seemed not even to need light to guide him. _It’s his house,_ Aura reminded herself.

The stairwell had no windows and was black as pitch, and Aura shivered. She’d never been afraid of the dark in the old world, because there was nothing in the Dark Castle or the lands around it that was worse than Rumpelstiltskin. But in her false memories, little Aurelia had feared the shadows, feared the things that lurked under the bed or in the closet, and after the accident, she’d known that they were real – that your fears could take form and come for you, and there was no way to protect yourself from them.

Gold’s hand was firm on her back as he urged her forward. “Go on, now.”

Aura resisted, and turned back to look at him. “You never told me what happened to your leg,” she blurted, her discretion dissolved in whiskey and emotion.  

His face was in shadow, but she could still see the twitch as he failed to control his expression, the spasm that contorted his features. She’d hurt him, demanding the truth about it. “A choice,” he said gruffly as he lifted his hand and clung to the doorframe. “Long ago, and much like yours. Now _go.”_

She didn’t need telling again. If she had to see that kind of pain on his face again, it was going to undo her; it was all she could do to carry her own pain, much less another’s. She dashed up the stairs in her bare feet, wishing she could flee farther than the height of a house.


	11. Felo-de-se

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aura stops fighting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings for suicide. (This isn't a reflection of what's going on with me personally, btw - it's only the character!)
> 
> The quotes are from Amy Levy's poem "Felo de Se" (http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/felo-de-se/)

  
_For repose I have sighed and have struggled ; have sigh'd and have struggled in vain;_  
 _I am held in the Circle of Being and caught in the Circle of Pain._  
 _I was wan and weary with life; my sick soul yearned for death…_

_…I have neither a voice nor hands, nor any friend nor a foe;_  
 _I am I - just a Pulse of Pain - I am I, that is all I know._  
 _For Life, and the sickness of Life, and Death and desire to die;_    
 _They have passed away like the smoke, here is nothing but Pain and I._

* * *

The hangover lasted little more than a day, but the despair that had brought on the drinking didn’t leave her. Not that day, or any day after that.

Confused and put off-balance by Gold’s reaction to her breakdown, Aura retreated into her work and tried to avoid him as much as possible - which wasn't much at all, considering that they worked together in a small shop. Her mood had been bad ever since she'd recovered her memories, but now it was just plain bleak. The only person she knew from the old world wasn’t who she thought he was, and she was still trapped, though in a different cage than before.

The Dark Castle had been lonely, but it was awful being stuck in a town full of people who didn't know their true selves, doomed to the repetitive false lives that Regina had arranged for them. What made things worse was that she couldn’t seem to make friends with anyone. They were all far too afraid of Mr. Gold and leery of her because she was supposed to be sleeping with him, and her attempts had all been met with polite rebuffs. In her ten free years she'd never had many close friends, but being cooped up with Gold all the time was more than she could stand, and she'd hoped that there might have been even a small chance of finding companions in Storybrooke.

The reality of the curse was the hardest part. Aura had had the stain of death on her conscience for ten years, but now she could no longer hide behind the illusion that she couldn’t have prevented it. She was a murderer for choosing to take Rumpelstiltskin’s deal, and that knowledge hung heavy on her. Sometimes she felt like dashing through the main street shouting it to the world, as if that might relieve the weight for some short time, but she knew it for futility. Regina would only use it as an excuse to declare her insane and lock her up in a psych ward or prison, and then she would be in an even smaller cage.

She might be a part of the curse and aware of it, but she was just as trapped among an entire town full of people as she had been in the Dark Castle. Worse: here she could still see the hope of the simple life she could no longer have.

He’ll _never give that to you,_ a small, treacherous voice said in the back of her mind, day after day. _Why do you stay with him? He wants only to use you. When he has what he came here for, do you really think there will be a place for you again? He doesn’t really care about you. Nobody’s left to care about you…if there ever was anyone. What’s the point in trying anymore? What’s the point?_

She'd heard that voice before. It had been loudest in the hospital after the accident, and caught up in the pain and guilt of losing her family, she’d nearly lost _herself_ to it. Only shame at her own cowardice had eventually given her the strength to bury it, no matter what the psychiatrist said. And now it was back.

This time, there wasn’t a damn thing she could do to change her situation. After the accident she’d completely overhauled her life, abandoned what it had been and tried to build something new. But now she was bound by the curse, and her deal with Rumpelstiltskin, and there was no way to escape any of it.

Aura found herself wondering what could drive a man to raise and protect a child that he didn’t love…or chose not to. The qualities lent to his curse by her blood were valuable, yes, but that couldn’t have been the only reason he’d kept her. Or rather, she hoped it wasn’t the only thing. Because to think otherwise meant to admit she was little more than a trophy, like the rest of his collection.

If her ten years had done anything, it was to force Aura to admit that she could depend on no one but herself. Anyone could prove false, or leave, or be lost. And she feared that in Storybrooke, she was losing _herself_ again. Even though Gold had said that Emma’s eventual arrival would set things in motion, she couldn’t see anything happening. Gold had waited decades for the curse to play out, perhaps hundreds of years before that, but she couldn’t stand the thought of _years_ of being trapped, forced to play the lackey once more.

There was no comfort to be found with him, either. After the faint overture the night she’d gotten drunk, he’d withdrawn into the kind of distance she remembered from her last years in the Dark Castle. He asked no more favors of her, set her no tasks beyond the contracts, and waiting for his plans to come to fruition was maddening.

As the summer dragged on in an endless repetition of waiting for nothing to happen, the voice in her head grew more persistent. What was the point of carrying on? Rumpelstiltskin could do just as well without her. Gold didn’t _need_ an accountant. And she was living a stolen life. The guilt of what her decision had done to an innocent family had never left her, and there were nights when she couldn’t sleep for crying. Stubborn and cold-hearted as she could sometimes be, she couldn’t deny that it should have been her dead on the pavement that night, not them.

She was sitting on the third-floor balcony of the pink house one evening, staring at nothing in particular, when she finally ran out of reasons to keep living.

Gold had left her with the means to end things – or rather his curse and her anemia had. She'd almost collapsed when she'd reached the boundaries of the town. She could have died. This time, if she didn’t turn back…well, the curse would do the rest.

As if in a dream, she watched herself slip out of the apartment, down the stairs, across the yard, and down the street toward the forest. That was the fastest way out of town, and very few people used the trails in the evening. By the time anyone found her, it would be too late.

When twilight fell, she was miles into the woods. The moon was out early and it gave her enough light to travel by as she headed for the toll bridge. It felt right, somehow, to seek to end her life in the spot where she’d stolen those of a strange family. Her life for theirs, since it was apparently so worthless to everyone else around her. When she reached the bridge she would leave the road, leave no sign of her presence.

Aura could feel the curse when she finally came in sight of the bridge. Her heart began to pound and she grew lightheaded; still, she took a deep breath and scrambled down the brushy slope to the creekbed, determined to go through with it. The creek, as she knew, was deep here, and she had to walk upstream almost a quarter mile before the water became shallow enough to cross. The creek water was surprisingly cold for summertime, and she was wet to the waist by the time she reached the other side.

The curse pressed on her senses, making her bones ache with every step she took.

Just a bit farther. Just a bit, and there would be no more contracts, or deals, or broken hopes, or wasted lives. Aura stumbled forward one more step, two, as if through syrup, and then pain lanced through her heart. Burning in her veins, cotton clouding her brain, and she was falling on the cobbles at the edge of the riverbed.

A tiny part of her mind screamed at her to turn back, to save herself, but she resisted. She would be free, even if this was the only way, and no one would miss her...

Death was noisy, she thought a while later. Crunching and grating and with harsh voices bombarding her ears. She'd always thought it would be a quiet thing. But maybe she deserved this, deserved the stabbing pains and the pounding on her chest, for taking the coward's way out. She tried to retreat from it, tried to sink back into the dark she'd sought, but something dragged her back. Something forced her heart to beat, her lungs to draw breath. 

The wailing was horrific. Had she gone to hell after all? Was this part of her punishment for suicide? With a monumental effort she opened her eyes a sliver, but could make no sense of what she saw. It was all a dark blur, with vague flashes of light that came and went. Her chest ached fiercely and it felt like someone had filled her veins with acid; her arms were clamped to her sides. Someone was clutching her hand, speaking harshly, but she didn’t want to listen. No, better to retreat from this, back into the darkness where it was quiet...

If this was death, it smelled awful, she decided when she was lucid once more. Acrid and harsh, impersonal. Starch and antiseptic and cleaning solution...no, this wasn't death. She was pretty sure it wouldn’t smell like fake lemons.

Aura blinked her eyes open. It took a moment for the blurry wash of colors to resolve, but when it did, she could tell that she was in a darkened room. The walls were curious, though; glassy and transparent in places, where she could see muted lights and figures moving.

And she wasn't alone. There was a chair beside the bed she lay on, and leaning back in it with his eyes closed was Gold. He looked...different. The lines on his face were deeply etched and he seemed unguarded, and tired.

She tried to breathe a little deeper and found that her lungs wouldn't obey. Something stabbed painfully into her side and she gasped as she tried to catch her breath. There was a mask over her face, and for a moment she panicked, fearing that it would suffocate her; she tried to reach up and pull it off, but hands caught her wrists and held them back.

"Leave it," Gold said, his voice rough, as though he'd strained it. "You're in the hospital, Aura."

Oh, gods. Even this had backfired. Somehow he'd followed her, kept the curse from killing her. But she'd left no indication of where she'd gone, or even that she was likely to try and run. "How?" she rasped, her voice distorted by the mask. "How did you know?"

He released her wrists, but pulled the chair closer and rested his arms on the bed. "A feeling," he said quietly. "You've been...not yourself, lately."

"You noticed." Aura's tone was bitter, and she pulled her hands away from him. "How did you find me?"

Gold paused. “Magic,” he admitted. “There are still a few remnants of magic here. Before I gave Regina the curse, I used a bit of your blood to make this.” He twisted the ring he wore, a heavy silver band set with a grayish stone; when Aura tried to focus on it, she could just barely see a hint of red at its center. “I wanted to be sure I could find you in this world,” Gold added. “It led me to you, but when I realized what had happened, I had to call the Sheriff – I couldn’t carry you – ” He stopped, took a deep breath, as if to gather his composure.

That couldn't be right, Aura thought, confusing mixing with her despair. He was never flustered. But he'd gone so far as to ask Regina's pet lawman for help, and he never asked for help, either.

"Mr. Humbert brought an ambulance. Your heart stopped, Aura. They nearly didn't get it started again."

That explained the pain in her chest. The paramedics had probably cracked a rib or two administering CPR. “You should have let me die," Aura said in a thready wheeze.

"Why, Aura? Why would you say that?" There was pain in his voice and she'd never heard that before. When she met his eyes, they were wide, almost anguished. Rumpelstiltskin, showing a real emotion? Over her?

“I can’t _do_ this,” she said, shaking her head. "I can’t live in a cage. I’m just as useless as I was before. There’s nothing to keep me here, _nothing_.”

Gold squeezed his eyes shut as if she had struck him, then bowed his head, looking down and away. "That isn't true. _I_ need you here."

Aura couldn’t help her gasp, and it turned into a deep and wrenching cough that made the muscles of her chest tighten painfully. When she could speak again, she said harshly, “You’ve never needed me. Not for anything but my blood. You _raised_ me, you protected me, and all…so I could be an _ingredient_ in your damned curse. A _tool_. Did you ever even think of me as a person?"

She stopped talking, exhausted by even that much. It was easier to close her eyes and hide again, shutting out the whole confusing mess her life had become. She’d been stupid to hope, stupid to trust this man, stupid to cling to the illusion that someone in the world wanted her for herself.

“You are more than just a tool,” Gold said, so softly that Aura wasn't sure she'd heard it. "You are the only one I can trust with the truth. The only one I can trust to understand my ways. I…wanted to keep you with me."

He trusted her? He was only placating her, surely. He didn’t form sentimental attachments. She couldn’t let herself believe him, lest he disappoint her again. “I’m a murderer,” she rasped.

Gold let out a long, shuddering breath. “And I am not?” he said, his voice getting higher, showing her just how upset he was. “Do you think I don’t know what it is to have blood on my hands? I am a monster, but even a monster cannot exist alone. I need you, Aura. You can’t leave me.”

There was a sob in his last words, and it was too much; Aura could feel her eyes tearing up and she began to shake. He’d never, _never_ shown her this face, not in all her years, and she didn’t know how to deal with it. “Give me a reason to stay,” she said, her voice breaking with emotion even as she challenged him. “Tell me I’m not useless. Tell me you care about _me!”_

He reached out and took her hand, gently, more gentle than she’d ever known him to be. "Everyone I've cared for is lost to me," he said, and now there was an old, weary sadness in his voice. "If I'd allowed myself... I didn't want to lose you too."

“You won’t even try,” she replied, heart sinking.

“I shouldn’t.”

Aura shook her head. He was going to push her away again, and they’d be right back where they started. He had always done this, avoided dealing with her upsets, her distress, her pain...and his own. She'd not put a word to it until reaching this world, but if she was a coward for running from life, so was he. “Then we’re both cowards,” she managed to say before her broken ribs made her wheeze. But this time she couldn't catch her breath. She clutched at his hand, eyes wide with panic, and when it became clear that something was wrong Gold yelled for help. Two nurses rushed in and bustled him out of the way, making her lie flat as they cranked up the oxygen on her mask and admonished her for trying to talk. They exchanged a quick conversation and then one prepared a needle and added some drug to her IV, saying that she needed to be still and rest. They wouldn’t quite bring themselves to throw Gold out, but one timidly suggested that he might want to let the patient sleep.

He ignored them. Aura was miserable from the pain in her chest and thanks to the drugs she couldn’t seem to stop crying, and she curled into the pillow. She hated being vulnerable, hated being sick and emotional. Most of all she hated herself for trying to take a coward’s route out of trouble, just like she had almost done after the accident. Had she always been so craven?

Gold pulled the chair back over to the bed – he’d pushed it away to get the nurses. “You should rest,” he said, perching uncertainly on the edge of the seat.

The drugs _were_ making her tired, and she closed her eyes again. She was being a coward, for letting him get away with dodging the issue, for giving up on it herself. She heard him shifting, getting up to leave, and she panicked again, cracking her eyes open again to look up into his deceptively gentle, human face. “Don’t leave!” The thought of being alone terrified her – if he left her alone here, he’d go back to leaving her alone everywhere else, even when she was working beside him in the shop. “Please don’t leave me.”

His mouth quivered, just a little, but he settled back into his chair. “I’ll stay for a while.”

The room went quiet, except for the beeping of the heart monitor and the hiss of the air conditioning. It was too quiet; everything came rushing in on her again, a thousand accusatory thoughts clamoring for her attention. “Can you talk?” she blurted, the drugs making her tongue thick and clumsy. “Just…just talk to me until I fall asleep?”

He paused long enough that she was sure he was ignoring her – or assumed she _had_ fallen asleep – but then, softly, he said, “Once upon a time there was a family who owned a vineyard at the foot of the West Mountains. The husband and wife were blessed with six sons, and the woman was with child again when the farmer was grievously injured by a cart. The couple, knowing they would starve if the husband could not bring in the harvest that year, called on the dark powers to help their family.”

He was telling her a story. _Her_ story. He’d never spoken of it before. She wanted to stop him, to ask a thousand questions, but she was too weary to even form the thoughts…

“Rumpelstiltskin heard their pleas and struck a deal - the life of their seventh child for a healing. He usually dealt in the firstborn, but a seventh son could be valuable as well. He knew that folk often broke his bargains, and relished the thought of extracting an even greater price from the family for their perfidy. But when the woman died in childbirth and the baby – a daughter – survived, the farmer gave her up without protest. For the babe had the raven locks and porcelain skin of his dead wife, and he could not bear to keep her.”

She felt, through the fog of the sedative, Gold’s hand stroking her hair. Or maybe she was dreaming it.

“So Rumpelstiltskin took her away…”

His words were just a sound, now, and Aura gave up trying to follow them as sleep took her.


	12. Where Memories Go

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rebuilding an alliance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, that's a reference to Robin McKinley's 'Beauty', which has always been one of my favorite versions of the story. I couldn't help myself!

The hospital staff let Aura sleep most of the next day. When she finally woke up enough to do something more than sip at a cup of water or adjust her blankets, Gold was back. 

She was still sick enough that it didn’t occur to her to try to control her reactions, as she normally would around him, and she smiled through her oxygen mask when she opened her eyes to find him in her room. For a brief moment, she almost forgot the reason she was in the hospital at all, and was only happy to see a familiar face. They’d raised the bed up a little today, to make breathing easier, but the only thing to do for her broken ribs was give her pain medication, and it made her slow and soppy.

Gold’s expression softened a bit. “Hey,” he said softly. He was carrying books, and set a stack of them down on the bedside table. “I brought you something to read.” He sounded distracted as he settled into the visitor’s chair and leaned his cane against his leg.

Aura’s smile faltered. Something was wrong – had he decided that last night had brought them too close? Was he about to push her away again? “What is it?” she asked, though she was afraid to hear the answer. 

He reached into his pocket and drew out a prescription bottle. “Are these yours?" 

She squinted at it in confusion. “Yes. For the anemia. Corticosteroids.” She had to speak in short sentences, or she started to cough, and that made her chest hurt even more. He had obviously gone to her apartment; the books were ones she had been reading, and the pills had been in the bathroom cabinet. But why would he bring them here? 

“Your doctor asked me to check what medications you were taking. When I showed him these, he was surprised at the dosage. He said it was very high." 

Aura shook her head slowly. "It isn't. They're low-dose. I've never needed much." 

"Then these are not the pills you were supposed to get." He set the bottle down on the bedside table with a click. "Until a few weeks ago, you were the girl I remembered. Angry, of course, but no less determined than you have ever been. But you changed…and even I noticed,” he added, his tone a little harsher, though she didn’t think it was directed at her. “Something happened to change you.” 

An ugly realization was looming. She knew all the side effects of her medication, and one serious one for these pills was depression. It was the reason she had a low dosage. "The last few times I refilled the prescription, I had to do it at the pharmacy here," she said slowly. "Someone...someone must have switched the pills." They were the same size in either concentration, and she hadn't checked the numerals carefully. She could have been taking the wrong dosage for months, and if Gold hadn’t interfered, no one would ever have realized why she was depressed...until it was too late.

“Regina,” Gold snarled, clutching his cane so hard she could hear it creak. "This stinks of her meddling."

"But...why wouldn't she just use magic?"

He shook his head. "There's no magic in this world, save for what we stored in talismans like the ring I used to find you. Regina has no magic that she didn't bring with her, and she hoards it. If she thought she could get away with mundane means, she would.” 

"And she knew I wouldn't go to you for help." Especially not from the man who had once been Rumpelstiltskin. Aura had seen too many people get themselves into trouble with his deals, and Regina knew that, and had played on it. “I knew she hated me,” Aura said softly. “But I didn’t think she’d try to kill me.”

"She'll do anything she thinks she can get away with." 

"Does she...know that we remember?" 

“She suspects. But she’s afraid to know for sure, I think.” 

“More fool her.” Aura sighed; this new development meant that she would have to tread even more carefully around the Mayor. Regina had failed this time, but her next attempt would be even more vicious and twice as devious. And if they wanted to try and maintain the pretense that they were ignorant of the curse, they couldn’t move against her without some _very_ careful planning.

That prospect made her head hurt, and in an effort to change the subject, Aura laid her hand on the stack of books Gold had brought. “Thanks for these,” she said. “And for staying with me last night.” She kept her tone casual, but it took courage for her to make the first overture. If there was any chance his feelings toward her had shifted, she needed him to acknowledge it, and she was scared that he wouldn’t.

Gold looked distinctly uncomfortable, as he always did when she dared speak of anything regarding their relationship, and for a moment Aura thought she’d screwed up again. “It was nothing,” he finally said, taking up his cane and rolling it between his fingers. 

“Not to me,” she replied. “Why – ” She broke off, coughing as the words caught in her throat, and holding her chest when the coughing made her ribs ache. “Why did you wait so long to tell me about my family?” she finally managed to say. 

“It didn’t seem…relevant. Last night…” He shrugged. “I thought it might comfort you.”

“Are they here in Storybrooke?” 

He looked at his hands, a sure sign that he didn’t want to be having the conversation, but he answered. “I don’t believe they are,” he said slowly. “Some years after I collected you, I returned to the vineyard. I found it destroyed, burned and trampled in the first skirmishes of the Third Ogre Wars, and no one could say what had happened to the family that lived there. Perhaps they had fled, but there was nothing left that I could use to track them down.” 

There would not have been, perhaps not even with magic, Aura thought. Wars were bad enough in this world, but she could imagine that the chaos of the Ogre Wars would make it far more difficult to find a family of no great fame. Her brothers and father would likely have been conscripted or killed, and as people of the lower class, there would have been little record of either.

She took a deep breath, steeling herself to ask the next question. “Did you look for them at all?” 

“Why would I?” Gold finally met her eyes, and there was more of a growl in his voice. “ _I_ needed you. And what if I had found your father or your brothers? Would you have gone with them, gone to live as a refugee, without property or prospects? What if they weren’t even alive?” 

Aura closed her eyes and shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know, all right? I…think I would have liked to know them, but…” She opened her eyes again and held up her hands in a helpless gesture. “I spent my life with _you_.” 

_That_ effectively stalled the conversation; she’d admitted she valued him more than her birth family, and he’d laid claim to her as more than a component of his spell. They were silent for a moment, each mulling over their own thoughts. Finally, Aura settled back on the pillows and wrangled her oxygen tube into a more comfortable spot. “What were they like?”

“Your family?” 

“Do you remember them?” 

Gold let his eyelids droop, leaning back in his own chair as if he were in his throne in the Dark Castle’s Great Hall. “I remember all my deals, dearie.” 

“Then tell me, please.” She twisted the sheets between her hands, not sure what he would tell her or what she would feel on hearing it. Or _if_ he would tell her. He didn’t often give up knowledge for free. 

He turned his cane slowly, watching the fluorescent lights reflecting off the gold head. “Black-haired, all of them. Your brothers had your father’s blue eyes, but you’ve your mother’s. Her build, as well. Your father was a sturdier man.” His mouth turned up at one corner. “Your mother insisted on reading through the contract before she signed it.” 

Aura blinked in surprise; then, a slow smile curved her lips. “That was…wise of her.” 

“Stubborn, more like. I can see where you acquired the trait.”

“Mmm. And my father?” 

The cane stilled. “He was sick, dearie. Too sick to show much in the way of personality, and on my second visit, grieving. Your mother died after giving birth to you.” Gold let the cane come to rest against his knee, carefully studying the floor.

There were things he wasn’t saying, and she was good at reading between the lines. “My father didn’t fight to keep me,” she murmured. Gold didn’t deny it, so she ventured, “Because I reminded him of my mother?”

“I believe so.” 

“I see.” She wasn’t sure how she was supposed to feel about it. Her only memories of a family were false ones, so she had no recollection of her true parents and no real attachment. Should she feel loyalty toward them? Should she be upset that her father had given her up?

One of the nurses bustled in, watching Gold warily as she fiddled with Aura’s IV and heart monitor. She commanded rest and cautioned Gold that visitors weren’t supposed to upset the patient; Gold’s expression was exasperated, but he did little more than glare at the nurse until she lost her nerve and left again. Aura sighed. “They’re awfully fussy here.” 

“They’re trying to protect you from the evil pawnbroker. Probably think I’ll insist on having you back at work tomorrow, invalid or no.” 

Aura allowed herself a weak chuckle, though she stopped when it made her ribs ache. “Only if you want to drag the oxygen tank in with me.” She rolled her shoulders to adjust the pillows, then looked back to Gold. “What books did you bring? And please don’t tell me they’re all fairy tales. I’m full up of those just now.” 

He smiled and lifted the stack from the table for her inspection, and she pointed to the third book down, a collection of Browning poems. “Would you read to me?” she asked. “This damn mask makes me go cross-eyed if I try to look at things close up.” 

“I didn’t think you’d want me to stay,” he replied, going still and guarded once more. Gods, she wished he’d stop doing that. She’d never realized just how much he hid from emotional matters, perhaps because in the other world he’d done it with glittering skin and strange eyes and a grating giggle. A mask. Except here she could see more easily when the mask went on. 

“I don’t want to be alone,” she said softly, thinking hard about how to put her thoughts into words. “And I don’t want things to go back to the way they were. I know it’s hard for both of us to…to be open with each other, but if I can’t do that with you, I’ve got no one.”

Gold’s lips parted and he looked like she’d just delivered a blow. And perhaps she had; she’d never said something like that out loud, not to him. After a moment, he nodded and slipped the Browning out of the stack. He fanned through the pages, then set his finger down on one and began to read. He had a good voice for it, Aura thought, deep and calm. It was so unlike her memories of his goblin’s cackle that she closed her eyes and just savored it for a bit.

Her reverie didn’t last long; he made her smile with “How They Brought the Good News From Ghent to Aix”, and his sly rendition of “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” had her clutching her chest to keep from laughing. But then he began “The Worst of It”, and she fell silent, hearing in his tone and his choice of poem what he could not bring himself to speak plainly.

He only made it to the third verse. “Yes, all through the speckled beast that I am / Who taught you to stoop / you gave me yourself / And bound your soul by the vows that damn…” His voice trailed off, and he looked down at the book.

Taking a deep breath, Aura reached out and clasped one of his hands, hoping to say with touch what he had used a poet’s words for. It was not in his nature to apologize, nor in hers to forgive, but if he could take a first tentative step toward a new companionship, she could meet him midway.

He left her hand where it was and started reading again, and kept on until her eyes began to droop. Then he wordlessly closed the book, returned her hand to the coverlet, and squeezed it gently before leaving her to rest once more.

* * *

Gold took her home a few days later, when the doctors at the hospital had decided that she wasn’t in danger of developing pneumonia. They loaded her up with pain pills and told her to stay home, and since she was still having trouble breathing and moving around on her own that meant Gold’s home, at least for a while. He installed her on a huge brocade sofa on the ground floor of the house, since there were no downstairs bedrooms, and even relocated a stack of her books next to the couch. 

She spent much of the first few days sleeping and reading and eating the soup he left simmering for her. Coming down off the higher dosage of her drugs made her weak and dizzy, but it was for the best; the depression that had gripped her began to lift, leaving behind a general irritation at how little she could manage. She could make her way around the ground floor of the house, but anything more strenuous than preparing tea or toast made her wheeze.

When Gold came home in the evening, if she was awake, they would exchange a few words. Their conversation was brittle and uncertain, after everything that had happened. Gold wasn’t quite sure how to deal with Aura’s emotional issues, and Aura was didn’t know how to react to the vulnerable side he’d shown her in the hospital. So, being cowardly all around, they kept to mundane topics. Aura had nothing to mention but the books, Gold nothing but business. 

That changed several days later, when he came home late, looking quite pleased. “Our Savior,” he declared with a theatrical flourish as he entered the living room, “has arrived.” 

Aura’s eyes widened, and she sat up straighter. “How do you know? Are you sure?” 

Gold’s smile was smug and self-satisfied. “Quite sure. She’s staying at Granny’s Inn, and she and Regina have already had more than one run-in.” He unbuttoned his coat and leaned his cane against the arm of his favorite chair before he sat down and proceeded to explain that Emma Swan had arrived a few days earlier in spectacular fashion, nearly throwing the Mayor into a conniption when she showed up with Henry, rammed her car into the town’s ‘historic’ welcome sign and spent a night in lockup. Gold related all these events to Aura with relish, and she couldn’t help but smile. It seemed that giving Henry the idea of tracking Emma down had been wildly successful. 

“I have it on good authority that Miss Swan will be extending her stay in Storybrooke,” Gold added. “Regina made the mistake of threatening her.” 

“That must have been quite a scene.” 

Gold reached into a pocket and came up with a leafy twig. “The spoils of war.”

She sat up further on the couch and took the twig from him. The leaves looked familiar… “Apple?” she asked, raising an eyebrow. 

He smiled. “It seems Miss Swan decided the mayor’s tree needed pruning.” He leaned back in his chair, and added in Rumplestiltskin’s voice, “With a chainsaw.” 

Aura whooped with laughter, then clutched her ribs and wheezed. “Oh, priceless,” she said when she could finally breathe. “I think I’m going to like her.”

“You’ll get your chance to meet her soon enough. She’s not the retiring type. But now that Regina is rattled enough to resort to mere physical revenge, I thought it prudent to ensure that you can defend yourself.” He reached out and opened a drawer in one of the end tables, pulling out a flat black case and setting it on her lap.

It was heavy, and Aura had the sinking suspicion she knew what was in it. When she flipped the catch and opened the lid, her fears were confirmed: a gun and a box of bullets, small but gleaming with a dull menace in the dim lamplight. She let out a slow breath and stared unhappily down at it. “I don’t want this,” she said. 

“It’s not a matter of what you want, dearie. You need a weapon.” 

Aura pressed her lips together in displeasure. “Rumpelstiltskin, you are handing a gun to someone who just tried to commit suicide. How the _hell_ am I supposed to feel about that?” She slapped the lid of the case closed and almost pitched it back at him. “Do you have any idea how easy it would be for me to just pick that up, the next time I get depressed, and pull the trigger? Do you?” 

He stared at her, and when he spoke again, he’d lost the tone of weary irritation with which he’d replied to her protest. “No,” he said simply, then fell silent. Clearly he hadn’t considered that side of things. 

She blinked back the tears that had risen in her eyes, and let out a long, shaky breath. “I…I’m glad that you want to keep me safe. But I can’t have a gun.” She raised a hand to stop him replying just yet. “I know you have others, and I won’t go looking for them. But you can’t give me one of my own.”

Gold leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “All right. But you need something. I won’t always be around to protect you, Aura, and Regina will try something much less subtle next time.” 

“Subtlety was never her strong point,” Aura murmured, relaxing a little. “I don’t know what else I could use. A broom is a bit too obvious.” She’d learned to be quite adept at using a broom as a weapon, in the Dark Castle, but Regina was unlikely to plague her with fire-loving salamanders or flying monkeys. “And you never did let me learn sword-fighting.”

He glanced at her sidelong. “No. But I did give you a weapon once.” He rose, took his cane and the gun box and disappeared into the depths of the house. Aura could hear him rattling around in one of the back rooms; when he returned, he held a slim cloth-wrapped object in his free hand. He flipped it end over end, caught it, and offered it to her with a flourish.

Her hand dropped with the sudden weight as she took the thing from him; it was heavy and cold under its wrappings. She carefully unwound the scrap of fabric to reveal two lengths of dull-grey metal, sandwiching folded layers of crimson fabric, and then she finally remembered what she held. “Gods, you kept it,” she said, slipping the metal end of the _tessen_ between her fingers and giving them a flick; the war-fan bloomed into a swathe of blood-red silk and razor-sharp steel ribs. 

“Of course I did,” Gold said, watching her. “Do you remember how to use it?”

Aura snorted; given his method of teaching her, she wasn’t likely to forget. Rumpelstiltskin had forbidden _her_ to have a sword, no doubt clinging to some outdated sense of womanly propriety, but once they’d settled on the tessen he’d made a point of forcing her to become an expert with the thing. Mainly, as she remembered, by enchanting the suits of armor in the castle to launch attacks whenever she came near. By the end of that phase the displays had acquired no small number of slashes and dents, and she could deflect anything from a sword-blow to a crossbow bolt. 

Recalling herself to the present – where she was in no shape to be leaping out at attackers – she twirled the fan around her hand in an arc, then flipped it into the air and caught the dull end of the ribs easily. “I think I can manage,” she replied, snapping it closed again.

“Good. That’s good.” He watched her wrap the tessen carefully and set it on the table next to the couch. “Enough plotting for tonight,” he added, standing again. “You should rest.”

Aura sighed. “That’s all I seem to do lately.”

He paused halfway through the door to the hall, but rather than replying with a quip or his usual biting sarcasm, Gold only seemed to sag a bit. “When you tangle with death, there’s a price to pay, dearie,” he said softly. “I’m only glad it didn’t cost you too much.”

He took advantage of Aura’s wide-eyed surprise at the freely given bit of affection to make his escape. 

* * *

Rumpelstiltskin hadn’t been wrong; the cost to her body had been high. But there were other costs that neither of them could have anticipated.

In her dreams that night, she smelled blood, and hot steel, and brimstone. The tang of the metal and the stench of the sulfur tore at her sensitive nose, and in her dream she sat up with a start. She didn’t want to have anything to do with that scent, because she _knew_ it from her old life. But it was like the monster under the bed – she wouldn’t be satisfied until she found it and assured herself that it couldn’t hurt her. 

Unsteadily, she rose from the couch. In the manner of dreams, she didn’t need to turn on a light to see; she passed through the cluttered rooms of Gold’s house like a wraith, barely brushing the obstacles in her path. A doorknob twisted under her hand, and she began descending a set of stairs. The smell was much stronger here, cloying, coating her tongue and making her gag.

Aura followed her nose until the scent filled her senses; she didn’t see what she was doing, couldn’t direct her hands or feet. She was not moving of her own volition – the dream, or whatever it was, held her fast. She thought she was kneeling, that her hands were moving, but what were they doing? 

And then she stopped. Something was in her hands, something long and heavy and _sharp_ , and she found that she wanted more than anything to get it _out_ of her hands. This object was something she feared and loathed. But she couldn’t see what it was… 

As if her thought had pressed a button to start a video, images flickered in front of her eyes, flitting through the darkness that surrounded her. She trembled as she leaned toward a man’s dirty boot, with her elbows in the dirt and her hair in her eyes. Blood dripped from a dagger she held, and her skin was blotched with grey and glitter that spread as she watched. She ladled stew into a carved wooden bowl and set it on a table with those marred hands, then picked up the dagger and offered it to someone. And then the familiar, wicked blade was slicing deep cuts in a white wrist, and the blood was welling up… 

Aura screamed. It was _her_ blood she was seeing, _her_ wrists, and she was back in the cave with Rumpelstiltskin and he was taking her lifeblood for the curse. “No!” she cried. “No, I won’t! Not again!” 

_“Aura!”_ he roared, but his voice was wrong, missing the sharp, mocking edge it should have had. It wasn’t Rumpelstiltskin, it was Gold. Her eyes snapped open at the sound, and she hadn’t even realized they’d been closed. She was crouched on a cold concrete floor next to a hole in the brick foundation; there was mortar scattered around her and her fingernails were torn to bits. And she was holding the dagger. _His_ dagger, the one carved with his name. The one he’d used to take her blood for the curse. 

Gold lurched down the stairs – _down_ , she must be in the basement – and came toward her. He was wearing a robe over pajamas, and clutching his cane, and his face was white and pinched. _“What are you doing?”_ he demanded, his voice deep and harsh. “How did you find that?” 

Aura dropped the dagger like it was a venomous snake and rocked back on her heels. “I don’t know,” she gasped, suddenly weak and shaking with exertion.

Gold crossed the floor and snatched up the blade in his free hand, his face contorting with anger. “There’s no way you could have known where this was,” he snarled. _“None._ What are you playing at, Aura?” 

_“Nothing!”_ she insisted. “I was _asleep!_ Gods, I thought it was a dream, but that smell…” She was breathing too deep for her ribs, and she started to cough. Even the _memory_ of the scent made her stomach turn. 

Slowly, Gold lowered the dagger, and his body relaxed a fraction. “You smelled something?” 

“Blood. Blood, and hot steel, and brimstone.” It took a moment for her muddled brain to make the connection, but when she did she looked up at him in confusion. “It’s what I always smelled around that dagger. But you said there was no magic here, not like that!” 

“There is not.” He regarded the dagger in his hands, frowning. “Did you see anything?” 

Aura closed her eyes, remembering. “Yes. I thought I was dreaming…but I saw it. The dagger. And other things, just flashes, but they weren’t my memories.” She didn’t know how she could say that, but the conviction was there; those had not been dream-images, but sights as real as what she was looking at now, and they had been from his perspective. She knew what his hands looked like, and it had been them she’d seen changing. “They weren’t mine. They were _yours_. Rumpelstiltskin, what’s _happening_ to me?” 

She couldn’t read his expression well in the dim light cast by a single hanging bulb, but it looked grim. “I can make a guess.” He turned the dagger so that it caught the light, and Aura shuddered. She wished he would put the damned thing away. “When I made the curse protect you, I had to bind you into it. You…became a part of it, for a time. And now that Miss Swan has come to town and time has started to pass again, the curse has begun to unravel. This vision may be one of the effects.” 

“I’m – I’m seeing things?” Aura blurted. “It’s turned me into a _seer?”_ She’d never met a seer, but she’d read about them in Rumpelstiltskin’s library, and she wanted no part of such a burden. Seers suffered with what they saw. She had enough bad memories of her own, and she couldn’t fathom the thought of being burdened with knowledge of what had happened to others. She didn’t want to be a Cassandra. 

“No,” Gold was quick to say. “No, this is not a seer’s gift. If you saw nothing of the future – if all you saw was my memories – then this is something different.” 

“How can you be sure?” 

To her surprise, he gave a quiet huff of a laugh. “Because I once took a seer’s power. I just don’t make a point of mentioning that prophecy numbers among my abilities. It’s a nasty, tricky business, looking at the future, and it often drives people mad.”

_That_ she would believe; if all she’d seen was the past, she couldn’t imagine what it was like to look into the future. “Then what’s going on with _me?”_ Aura demanded.

“You say you saw my memories.” He frowned, turning the dagger over in his hands. “The curse had to be able to affect our minds, to give us false memories and hide the old ones. It couldn’t take mine away, but it must have incorporated them somehow.” When he looked up at her, shadows were hiding his face, and she shuddered in sudden fear. “The curse is in your blood now, dearie. So then are the memories.”

“Oh, gods.” She closed her eyes and took a slow, uneasy breath. “Other people’s memories, too?” 

“Only time will tell.” He tucked the dagger into the belt of his robe and hobbled closer. “What did you see?” he asked, voice gone dangerously soft.

She opened her eyes again looked up to meet his gaze, but it wasn’t anger that she saw. It was fear, disguised; fear of what secrets she might have learned, fear that the knowledge could be used against him. And Aura found that she wanted to reassure him. “I saw you bowing before a soldier,” she said slowly. “I saw you holding the dagger, and your skin changing from human to…to what you were. I saw you spooning stew into a wooden bowl. And I saw you doing this,” she added, rubbing the long scar on her wrist. “But…I saw them all _as_ you. They were true memories?”

He seemed to subside a little, as though he had been expecting to hear worse. “Yes. They’re true.”

“And the dagger…is how you became the Dark One.” 

A long moment passed. “Yes,” he finally admitted. “Part of it. Aura – ” 

“I don’t want to know more,” she said hurriedly. “I don’t. Whatever power that dagger has, I don’t want to know how it works.” 

He took a deep breath, as though in relief. “It must be kept secret,” he said, touching the weapon’s hilt. “The dagger is powerless here, but should the curse break, I would not wish it to fall into the wrong hands.”

Her own heart, which had been thumping uncomfortably, slowed a bit. “Why on earth would you hide it in the house?”

He offered a hand. “I thought it safe enough. But if you were able to find it, others might as well – though I trust they would not have the benefit of memories to guide them.”

Aura brushed away the dirt and put her hand in his, wincing at the way her ribs protested. She was doing better physically, but she was still dizzy and short of breath most of the time, and she needed Gold’s support to stand straight. “Some benefit. I thought I was supposed to be immune to this sort of thing,” she grumbled.

“Magic is unpredictable here. And you are –”

“Bound to the curse. I know, I know. Fantastic. And what happens if I can’t control this and I start seeing things in public? Regina’s already tried to get me declared a suicide risk – she’d love to get me locked up for being crazy.” There had been some unpleasantness when she was discharged from the hospital, and Gold had had to invoke some pretty stiff privacy laws to keep the Mayor from sticking her nose into the reasons behind Aura’s visit.

“I suppose you’ll just have to be more careful.”

Aura gritted her teeth. “Or maybe I just need to take a knife to her throat.”

He clicked his tongue as they reached the top step. “Don’t be so crude, dearie. Regina will give you weapons enough without resorting to physical means.”

She snorted softly. “Providing I haven’t gone mad in the meantime.” 

“Oh, you’re far from that, believe me.” He opened the door and ushered her through it.

The cool wood floors felt good on her feet, but she had more attention for the dark humor in Gold’s voice. “And you would know this how?”

It was his turn to make a noise of derision. “I played the part long enough for Snow White and her Prince. It was all part of the game,” he added, reverting to Rumpelstiltskin’s high-pitched twitter. “A mad sorcerer for their dungeon, so they would think I had no part in the curse.”

“Ah.” It seemed that a great deal had gone on in the Enchanted Forest after he’d put her under that sleeping spell. “Perhaps someday you’ll fill me in on the rest of the details of this plan I’m supposed to be helping you with.”

He left her to lean against a wall as he shut the basement door. “In time.”

_“Rumpelstiltskin,”_ she said forcefully, and he looked back at her. “Who can you trust with your plans, if not me?”

His face was hidden in shadow, but she could tell that he was dropping his gaze, caught off-guard. “Perhaps…perhaps I just wanted to spare you what difficulties I can.”

He’d surprised her twice in one day with a frank admission. And for the first time in a long while, Aura felt hope…hope that this whole thing was really going to work, and that one day, she would have a real family. And if Rumpelstiltskin was willing to let it be with him, she would seize that chance. Damned visions or no. “Thank you,” she murmured. “But I gave me word to help you, and I will. If you’ll let me.”

He nodded and said nothing more, but the care with which he helped her back to bed spoke his appreciation as eloquently as words. With Rumpelstiltskin, words had always been the foundations of deals; for emotion, it seemed, they conversed better in silence.


End file.
